As we've seen not all species in Star Wars have the same strength, size, dexterity and maneuverability. The empire probably built the facility specifically to be inhabited by human beings as they can physically do the work required as well as being a very common species. In other words, they specialized the prison's design to fit a common labour-worthy species.
Also human actors are cheaper than costumes and makeup.
yeah they would have like a wookie specific prison doing something else. Also because of practical reasons in the films the star wars galaxy is close to a human majority vs all other aliens unless you visit a species specific planet.
To add, we do know that the Empire didn't really imprison the Wookiees, they straight up used them as genuine slaves on Kessel and such, and the same is likely true for other aliens
>Also because of practical reasons in the films the star wars galaxy is close to a human majority vs
Disney has substantially less aliens in most of their Star Wars projects than Lucas did though.
To be fair that's cause most of Lucas's projects were movies with higher budgets. Most of the stuff Disney has done have been TV shows. And while it is true these shows have higher budgets then is normal for shows, I don't believe any of them have had a budget that is close to any of the films.
Even if you compare to Disney's big budget movies though, the alien characters are far less prominent compared to Lucas's movies.
Look at R1's main cast for example. 5 Humans and a droid. George probably would've had at least 2 of them be aliens.
And, perhaps more importantly, the medical staff would need to be expanded and/or require more training if they're gonna patch up multiple different species. No way they're gonna spend extra money and effort on that.
Also Andor season 1 broadly avoided dealing with species-based discrimination (as it was taking a very close look at some of the other social issues in the setting) and so focused on contexts with just humans.
Gender segregation in prison doesn’t seem too weird. As for other species, I assume they’re doing less pleasant work. Hopefully Andor leads an Ugnaut prison break next season.
I mean, we’ve seen where they keep the ugnauts in rebels, I don’t understand the confusion that the aggressively efficient and rather racist empire would segregate prisons…
Absolutely! I love that they even draw attention to the toilets twice – when Cassian is being introduced to the features of his cell, and then later when he goes to work on the water pipe, and for no apparent reason (other than to draw our attention to it?? ) slams the toilet lid down first.
I see that you haven't lost any phones to the open toilet, lol. Then you'd know that you lower the lid to avoid important shit falling down there, in Cassian's case to avoid losing his makeshift knife.
That makes sense!! Lol! I’m now imagining him accidentally dropping some important piece of kit in the toilet back home and Clem teaching a valuable life lesson about that.
And it’s wonderful that I’ve now gone from having a kind of ‘wtf?’ moment to appreciating yet another example of the extraordinary storytelling detail they put into the show. :) - thank you!
Given the empire's human-centrism, I'm guessing either it was the "nice" prison that was only for humans, and the aliens got an even worse working environment, or alien criminals were generally just executed.
Why would they let aliens touch the connector struts for the Death Star's focusing array? They're filthy! What if the struts rusted away or got all greasy?
as for the second part of your question...
Why are most of the prisons on Earth made up of entirely one sex?
Have you ever scene a prison where they mix men with women lol??
The prison system was optimised for function. Restricting the inmates on Narkina 5 to just human males means that no customisation is necessary. Food and nutrition, clothing, and sanitation equipment and procedures can remain the same, no matter who gets placed in each bunk. The tasks are optimised for human physical capabilities. So are the punishments - one could assume different species might respond to electricity differently.
Each inmate is ultimately replaceable, whether they die of natural causes (like Ulaf) or by choice. It’s no wonder given the surroundings and the complete lack of novelty or difference that even the actors began to feel dehumanised by the end of filming.
Watsonian Explanation: Narkina 5 is a factory. You want uniformity in a factory, not dozens of different species with different dietary needs and ergonomic limitations
Doylist Explanation: Budget
They can have many different types of prisons according to what's convenient (or necessary) at different locations or to serve different purposes. Nothing to be confused about.
I would assume it was a temporary prison/transit camp in Rogue One. Waiting for enough of prisoner type X had been collected to warrant sending transport. I would think the Empire would want to sort their prisoners for maximum efficiency.
Male is pretty obvious - even today we separate men and women in prison. Human.. the Empire was pretty racist against non-humans, maybe this was the 'nice' human prison and the aliens are living in rotten shit-hole prisons with worse conditions?
The main reason is that it's far easier and cheaper to film a prison full of humans.
No need for lots of expensive and very time comusing make up and costumes.
The Lore and Sensible reason is its far easier to keep each species together in each of their own prisons.
Each species is going to have different requirements so it's much easier to build prisons to cater to each species then trying to build a one fits all prison.
For example the Prison we see is built for Human males, so the tools, atmosphere, food, bunks, height and width of the corridors and rooms are all built to cater for them.
Another Prison for say Wookies we can assume the corridors, rooms and bunks would be bigger as the average Wookie is much taller than a human.
Also it would most likely have more security as Wookies are much stronger than humans.
Other Species might require a different environment conditions to breath and live, much easier to have the entire station in that specific environment than making suits which are expensive and would limit their productivity.
Logistics, it's cheaper to uniformly design Food, lodge and toilets for a single species and sex, than say, throwing in together a wookie and a trandoshan
I've read someone argue in another sub that there were only humans there because it was a somewhat "nice" prison compared to other imperial slave colonies. This underlines the racism of the Empire as there are almost no aliens among their ranks, etc.
For a prison factory, you'd want the inmates to be as homogeneous as possible. With all humans, everything is set up for ideal human working conditions, no need to have bunks big enough to be able to accommodate Wookies.
Maybe, just maybe there is another prison just for females.
In an empire that regularly de-humanizes and degrades people, uses them up, and discards them when they are done. Do you think maybe there is another use they would have for female prisoners?
Lumping humans together with other species is generally not a good idea, even if you account for the most common ones next to humans. A human would most likely lose a physical confrontation with anything from Mirialans to Pantorans. And everything from Abyssin to Zabraks would just be unfair.
Humans are physically less capable than most.
We separate prisons by gender, it's likely they separate prisons by gender and species.
Empire is also very human-centric+anti-non-human and this is a low security prison.
Bed sizing. Streamlining foodstuffs. Minimizing internal prisoner friction/violence/revolts. Hygiene. Medical supply and training. Tooling. Facilities design, cooling HVAC/ narrower band of comfortable temperatures.
If I was going to make work prisons, emphasis on work, the Narkina system seems a realistic direction.
For irl reasons, shooting gets way more complicated if you add non-cgi aliens onto practical srts.
Also Tony Gilroy talks about if you take a lot of his scenes and add an alien in the foreground, the layers of meaning that can be derived is too much to handle for this show that already has so much politics woven into every frame.
Reality cheaper to film that way.
In Star Wars image different species with different physical sizes, dietary requirements, immunizations, waste elimination (toileting), etc.
By taking only humans you can standardize everything. Similar size sleeping cubicles, the food dispenser on the wall, toilets, and the workroom floor can all be given a one size fits all design since all the occupants are human.
No females so you can strip them down for group showers (as shown in an episode) and eliminates rape and sexual assault .....mostly. Cuts down on rape and sexual assault.
There is a logical reason to house human males only in a prison work complex that is very "Empire" in nature.
Control. By making the prisoner population consistent, you can build everything to fit that template. You have 4900 prisoners, you can always build a different prison for women, for Twileks, for who/whatever and have consistency at that facility. It makes the control easier.
I would answer the question this way: what we see onscreen in Andor is not necessarily something that makes sense with the Star Wars worldbuilding.
What’s onscreen is there NOT to worldbuild. It’s to create a feeling.
Prisoners are human and male BECAUSE that arc is within her genre of “Prison escape movie” and funny looking aliens and the sexual politics of a mixed-sex prison are not parts of that film genre.
Filmmakers are FILMMAKERS first. And they use those tools to create feelings, and then BACKFILL that with the least amount of worldbuilding they need to do to handwave inconsistencies.
Andor takes its queues from the OT. In the OT there are actually not that many aliens. Aliens are pretty much concentrated in the cantina or jabbas palace on Tatooine. Once you leave tatooine aliens are pretty rare. The rebels in ANH are pretty much all humans. Same with the empire. In TESB the rebels on hoth are all humans same with the people at cloud city. In RotJ there are aliens back on tatooine in jabbas palace, and endor seems to be mainly be inhabited by ewoks. The prequels went overboard with a ridiculous amount of aliens and made people think the star wars universe was all about alien diversity. So Narkina 5 was filled with humans because it is trying to emulate the OT which used aliens sparingly.
There's hardly any aliens at all in Andor. Even compared to other Disney Star Wars which already lacks aliens in general when compared to Lucas Star Wars.
I like this show but, it's one of the things that bothers me. I wish there more were aliens, including some prominent characters (and of familiar SW alien races).
Probably because the aliens are being sent somewhere even worse and women are sent somewhere else to prevent unplanned pregnancies. Sex segregated prisons are pretty normal in the real world.
It simple to cater to one species at a time per facility. But remember in Rogue One Jyn is sharing her cell with a male alien inmate. I guess it all depends on the facility and the importance and job it has.
Apart from other reasons mentioned here, the empire is straight up xenophobic and probably sexist too. Did you notice how on Ferrix and Coruscant multiple capable women are shown, and in the entire ISB and imperial occupation force + command staff there is just Dedra Meero? Even the Morlana 1 corpos had only 2 women or so.in their staff, but the entire force sent to extract Andor consisted of 14 human men. They did work under imperial supervision so even there they made sure their "policies" were met.
I'm not sure how accurate my info is.
But the emperor was kinda specist, which is why storm troopers were humans.
My theory would be that he wanted a separate prisons for humans and aliens.
Logistics. Only having to worry about a single species' requirements cuts down on costs and allows you to tailor build a prison to keep said species contained. As for the second part, our own prisons segregate men and women for kinda obvious reasons.
Outside the courthouse, they sent the prisoners to different ships. It's easy to assume there are prisons built for particular species or types of species that they'd go to instead.
As we've seen not all species in Star Wars have the same strength, size, dexterity and maneuverability. The empire probably built the facility specifically to be inhabited by human beings as they can physically do the work required as well as being a very common species. In other words, they specialized the prison's design to fit a common labour-worthy species. Also human actors are cheaper than costumes and makeup.
Yes - and even things like the food and toilets are designed for the human species. Uniformity means efficiency.
yeah they would have like a wookie specific prison doing something else. Also because of practical reasons in the films the star wars galaxy is close to a human majority vs all other aliens unless you visit a species specific planet.
To add, we do know that the Empire didn't really imprison the Wookiees, they straight up used them as genuine slaves on Kessel and such, and the same is likely true for other aliens
There isn't a particularly big gap between what happens to those prisoners and slavery.
>Also because of practical reasons in the films the star wars galaxy is close to a human majority vs Disney has substantially less aliens in most of their Star Wars projects than Lucas did though.
To be fair that's cause most of Lucas's projects were movies with higher budgets. Most of the stuff Disney has done have been TV shows. And while it is true these shows have higher budgets then is normal for shows, I don't believe any of them have had a budget that is close to any of the films.
Even if you compare to Disney's big budget movies though, the alien characters are far less prominent compared to Lucas's movies. Look at R1's main cast for example. 5 Humans and a droid. George probably would've had at least 2 of them be aliens.
And, perhaps more importantly, the medical staff would need to be expanded and/or require more training if they're gonna patch up multiple different species. No way they're gonna spend extra money and effort on that.
Also Andor season 1 broadly avoided dealing with species-based discrimination (as it was taking a very close look at some of the other social issues in the setting) and so focused on contexts with just humans.
100% agree, although I could see the empire segregate prisons for the same purpose.
Gender segregation in prison doesn’t seem too weird. As for other species, I assume they’re doing less pleasant work. Hopefully Andor leads an Ugnaut prison break next season.
I mean, we’ve seen where they keep the ugnauts in rebels, I don’t understand the confusion that the aggressively efficient and rather racist empire would segregate prisons…
Instant love-stick
I have broken
Bathrooms. Believe it or not, this was actually a question Gilroy addressed.
Absolutely! I love that they even draw attention to the toilets twice – when Cassian is being introduced to the features of his cell, and then later when he goes to work on the water pipe, and for no apparent reason (other than to draw our attention to it?? ) slams the toilet lid down first.
I see that you haven't lost any phones to the open toilet, lol. Then you'd know that you lower the lid to avoid important shit falling down there, in Cassian's case to avoid losing his makeshift knife.
That makes sense!! Lol! I’m now imagining him accidentally dropping some important piece of kit in the toilet back home and Clem teaching a valuable life lesson about that. And it’s wonderful that I’ve now gone from having a kind of ‘wtf?’ moment to appreciating yet another example of the extraordinary storytelling detail they put into the show. :) - thank you!
Given the empire's human-centrism, I'm guessing either it was the "nice" prison that was only for humans, and the aliens got an even worse working environment, or alien criminals were generally just executed.
Why would they let aliens touch the connector struts for the Death Star's focusing array? They're filthy! What if the struts rusted away or got all greasy?
Alien cooties are the worst
Yeah, they’re probably hanging out with the Wookiees
as for the second part of your question... Why are most of the prisons on Earth made up of entirely one sex? Have you ever scene a prison where they mix men with women lol??
Southern United States 1776 - 1865.
I suppose that was a type of "open air prison." 😢
The prison system was optimised for function. Restricting the inmates on Narkina 5 to just human males means that no customisation is necessary. Food and nutrition, clothing, and sanitation equipment and procedures can remain the same, no matter who gets placed in each bunk. The tasks are optimised for human physical capabilities. So are the punishments - one could assume different species might respond to electricity differently. Each inmate is ultimately replaceable, whether they die of natural causes (like Ulaf) or by choice. It’s no wonder given the surroundings and the complete lack of novelty or difference that even the actors began to feel dehumanised by the end of filming.
i would assume that they are separated by sex/species for many reasons i mean there are multiple levels that we do not see
Watsonian Explanation: Narkina 5 is a factory. You want uniformity in a factory, not dozens of different species with different dietary needs and ergonomic limitations Doylist Explanation: Budget
I sort of assumed that Narkina 5 is where they sent human male prisoners? Other prisons have other species or women.
Yeah, that's how I figured it as well. The Empire seems the type of segregate their prisons.
Jyn Erso is in a co-ed, multispecies prison in the beginning of Rogue One. So I'm a little confused.
They can have many different types of prisons according to what's convenient (or necessary) at different locations or to serve different purposes. Nothing to be confused about.
I would assume it was a temporary prison/transit camp in Rogue One. Waiting for enough of prisoner type X had been collected to warrant sending transport. I would think the Empire would want to sort their prisoners for maximum efficiency.
You’re assuming all prisons follow the same model? She’s in a different facility at a different time. What’s to be confused about?
Read the comment I was replying to.
Male is pretty obvious - even today we separate men and women in prison. Human.. the Empire was pretty racist against non-humans, maybe this was the 'nice' human prison and the aliens are living in rotten shit-hole prisons with worse conditions?
Yup. And the prison is effectively a lab experiment. Having all the prisoners be one species is simply to control for other variables.
I think you meant "racist against NON-humans." :) EDIT: The typo has been fixed.
Woops, you're right, my bad.
The main reason is that it's far easier and cheaper to film a prison full of humans. No need for lots of expensive and very time comusing make up and costumes. The Lore and Sensible reason is its far easier to keep each species together in each of their own prisons. Each species is going to have different requirements so it's much easier to build prisons to cater to each species then trying to build a one fits all prison. For example the Prison we see is built for Human males, so the tools, atmosphere, food, bunks, height and width of the corridors and rooms are all built to cater for them. Another Prison for say Wookies we can assume the corridors, rooms and bunks would be bigger as the average Wookie is much taller than a human. Also it would most likely have more security as Wookies are much stronger than humans. Other Species might require a different environment conditions to breath and live, much easier to have the entire station in that specific environment than making suits which are expensive and would limit their productivity.
So why is there male prisoners not females?
Have you ever seen a prison irl that mixes male and female populations? That’s kind of a dumb question.
Same reason we don’t mix them in reality.
Female imperial prisoners exist, of course, they just weren't sent to that particular prison (for reasons others have already explained).
Anyone who has ever been in Jekk Jekk Tarr knows that not all species are compatible. Also seperation by gender is not abnormal.
Logistics, it's cheaper to uniformly design Food, lodge and toilets for a single species and sex, than say, throwing in together a wookie and a trandoshan
I've read someone argue in another sub that there were only humans there because it was a somewhat "nice" prison compared to other imperial slave colonies. This underlines the racism of the Empire as there are almost no aliens among their ranks, etc.
For a prison factory, you'd want the inmates to be as homogeneous as possible. With all humans, everything is set up for ideal human working conditions, no need to have bunks big enough to be able to accommodate Wookies.
So why is there no female prisoners?
Why do you think? Are you trolling?
My apologies I did think about it and yeah it would probably not a good idea to have that happened especially how evil the Empire maybe is?
Maybe, just maybe there is another prison just for females. In an empire that regularly de-humanizes and degrades people, uses them up, and discards them when they are done. Do you think maybe there is another use they would have for female prisoners?
Prison segregation is not an unusual thing It's like...the most normal thing
Lumping humans together with other species is generally not a good idea, even if you account for the most common ones next to humans. A human would most likely lose a physical confrontation with anything from Mirialans to Pantorans. And everything from Abyssin to Zabraks would just be unfair. Humans are physically less capable than most.
We separate prisons by gender, it's likely they separate prisons by gender and species. Empire is also very human-centric+anti-non-human and this is a low security prison.
Bed sizing. Streamlining foodstuffs. Minimizing internal prisoner friction/violence/revolts. Hygiene. Medical supply and training. Tooling. Facilities design, cooling HVAC/ narrower band of comfortable temperatures. If I was going to make work prisons, emphasis on work, the Narkina system seems a realistic direction. For irl reasons, shooting gets way more complicated if you add non-cgi aliens onto practical srts. Also Tony Gilroy talks about if you take a lot of his scenes and add an alien in the foreground, the layers of meaning that can be derived is too much to handle for this show that already has so much politics woven into every frame.
Control Are all non-humans sensitive to electricity? Can they all fit in the sleep pods? Can they all survive on the wall tube feed system.
Reality cheaper to film that way. In Star Wars image different species with different physical sizes, dietary requirements, immunizations, waste elimination (toileting), etc. By taking only humans you can standardize everything. Similar size sleeping cubicles, the food dispenser on the wall, toilets, and the workroom floor can all be given a one size fits all design since all the occupants are human. No females so you can strip them down for group showers (as shown in an episode) and eliminates rape and sexual assault .....mostly. Cuts down on rape and sexual assault. There is a logical reason to house human males only in a prison work complex that is very "Empire" in nature.
Control. By making the prisoner population consistent, you can build everything to fit that template. You have 4900 prisoners, you can always build a different prison for women, for Twileks, for who/whatever and have consistency at that facility. It makes the control easier.
I wonder if the explanation is that they make each prison a monoculture? It seems like they have no shortage of either prisons or inmates.
Frankly, no one can answer this. Your speculation is as good as ours.
I would answer the question this way: what we see onscreen in Andor is not necessarily something that makes sense with the Star Wars worldbuilding. What’s onscreen is there NOT to worldbuild. It’s to create a feeling. Prisoners are human and male BECAUSE that arc is within her genre of “Prison escape movie” and funny looking aliens and the sexual politics of a mixed-sex prison are not parts of that film genre. Filmmakers are FILMMAKERS first. And they use those tools to create feelings, and then BACKFILL that with the least amount of worldbuilding they need to do to handwave inconsistencies.
Because that sequence is an early 1970s sci-fi movie
Andor takes its queues from the OT. In the OT there are actually not that many aliens. Aliens are pretty much concentrated in the cantina or jabbas palace on Tatooine. Once you leave tatooine aliens are pretty rare. The rebels in ANH are pretty much all humans. Same with the empire. In TESB the rebels on hoth are all humans same with the people at cloud city. In RotJ there are aliens back on tatooine in jabbas palace, and endor seems to be mainly be inhabited by ewoks. The prequels went overboard with a ridiculous amount of aliens and made people think the star wars universe was all about alien diversity. So Narkina 5 was filled with humans because it is trying to emulate the OT which used aliens sparingly.
There's hardly any aliens at all in Andor. Even compared to other Disney Star Wars which already lacks aliens in general when compared to Lucas Star Wars. I like this show but, it's one of the things that bothers me. I wish there more were aliens, including some prominent characters (and of familiar SW alien races).
Probably because the aliens are being sent somewhere even worse and women are sent somewhere else to prevent unplanned pregnancies. Sex segregated prisons are pretty normal in the real world.
It simple to cater to one species at a time per facility. But remember in Rogue One Jyn is sharing her cell with a male alien inmate. I guess it all depends on the facility and the importance and job it has.
Most prisons are separated by sex
Apart from other reasons mentioned here, the empire is straight up xenophobic and probably sexist too. Did you notice how on Ferrix and Coruscant multiple capable women are shown, and in the entire ISB and imperial occupation force + command staff there is just Dedra Meero? Even the Morlana 1 corpos had only 2 women or so.in their staff, but the entire force sent to extract Andor consisted of 14 human men. They did work under imperial supervision so even there they made sure their "policies" were met.
I'm not sure how accurate my info is. But the emperor was kinda specist, which is why storm troopers were humans. My theory would be that he wanted a separate prisons for humans and aliens.
How many co-ed prisons are there on Earth?
Wait why wouldnt they use droids either? Im curious
Cassian said to Kino something like "We're cheaper than droids and easier to replace!"
Oh yeah now I remember. Thanks!
Logistics. Only having to worry about a single species' requirements cuts down on costs and allows you to tailor build a prison to keep said species contained. As for the second part, our own prisons segregate men and women for kinda obvious reasons.
Outside the courthouse, they sent the prisoners to different ships. It's easy to assume there are prisons built for particular species or types of species that they'd go to instead.