This only shows how unfuckingbelievably stupid the system is: They are promoting body building by installing all kinds of weight machines etc. and some of those inprisoned hunks become real world monsters everybody is afraid of.
If they would put the same amount of time into sitting at a table and playing a game that may eventually improve their intellectual capabilities because it enhances imagination, logic etc. then they may end up looking & behaving like a human being.
Don't want that, don't we?

Then again I've never been to prison and only have my prejudices...
 

Frankly, lots of stuff in prison can be considered as promoting gang activity. It is a question of what can be economically and humanely removed or prevented. Super Max is too expensive to use for everyone, and putting them all in mass graves has issues which I hope your other readers can derive for themselves.

Keep in mind what you are doing while Pen and Paper roleplaying. You are congregating, socializing, and you are organizing and planning. Communication, organization, and planning are skills which can be applied to bad ends, such as gang operations, breakouts and so forth. (Not to mention that the books and supplies are expensive, and might count as supplying luxury items to prisoners.)

The population in prison is not selected from the overall population at random. Opinions will vary, depending on one's understanding of human nature, criminology, and so forth. I am inclined to think that, given the population, roleplaying pozes an additional hazard, and neglible benefit.

As, unlike with excercise and nutrition, withholding roleplaying is not a health risk, I do not think it counts as cruel and unusual punishment.

I think reacting to this without first having thought about and studied some of the issues involving with confining and controlling thinking beings is a little bit silly myself. It is not a trivial problem, especially if you are trying to keep them intact.

I am skeptical of notions of rehabilitating criminals through roleplaying.
 

Haha. Convicts must absolutely know the less possible about communication, organization and planning if you want to safely release them into society at some point.

Actually, I suspect the reason behind this was the wardens getting sick of hearing "I sneak behind the troll guard and strangle him with my torn blanket, before sawing the bars with my nail file" every evening...
 

I am skeptical of notions of rehabilitating criminals through roleplaying.

Hmm,... that idea is intriguing, though, don't you think? After all, it would be cheap. And if it didn't work, so what? We'd at least learn something from the experiment. (Of course, nothing that doesn't seem like punishment to the average idiot on the street wouldn't go over very well politically, no matter how cheap and effective it might be, but that's another question.)

Maybe not table-top role-playing - and certainly not D&D - but I wonder if computer games could be used to teach prisoners about consequences. It couldn't be too heavy-handed, of course. It would have to be enjoyable to play (but I'm guessing that prisoners have a lot of time on their hands, and so they wouldn't be all that discriminating).

Well, most likely they'd end up with something laughably lame - sort of like the video game equivalent of "Reefer Madness." But I think the idea has merit, if only for research purposes. And our prisons are certainly failures right now. How much worse could they be?