Skip to main content

harry potter - How does Azkaban's management work?


I was under the impression that only Dementors are guarding the prison of Azkaban and are only there to keep the inmates on their cells, though after reading again the following passage it put me into thoughts:




'One night, when (the Dementors) opened my door to bring food, I slipped past them as a dog. It's so much harder for them to sense animal emotions that they were confused ... I was thin enough to slip through the bars. I swam as a dog back to the mainland. I journeyed north and slipped into the Hogwarts grounds as a dog. I've been living in the Forest ever since.'


Prisoner of Azkaban; chapter 'The Servant of Lord Voldemort'



So Sirius says that he escaped from his cell when the Dementors brought him food.... I say what??? Dementors dont obey anyone, not even the commands of the Ministry of Magic.


So the actual question is, How is the Azkaban prison managed? e.g. who cooks the food? the inmates have blankets, who is washing these blankets etc etc



Answer



The Dementors manage Azkaban


We know that after Azkaban was established, the atmosphere therein was so terrible that even brief visits were next to unbearable:




They turned a blind eye to the inhumane conditions inside the fortress, permitted it to be magically enlarged and expanded and rarely visited, due to the awful effects of entering a building populated by thousands of Dementors.



It seems very unlikely, then, that any witch or wizard could work there, if the mere incidental effects of visiting were so terrible.


As such, the Dementors must take on the routine duties of "caring" for prisoners, such as providing them with food and protection from the elements. This might seem incongruous, given that the general interest of Dementors is solely in draining the emotions from anyone, but it is not so; if the Dementors keep their victims alive, they can feed on them for decades, whereas without providing food and water, the Dementors could only feed for weeks. The Dementors are of roughly human intelligence; they can follow such a strategy as long as they are not too hungry.


Your own quote indicates that Dementors bring food to prisoners. They can also bring blankets and so forth, so long as they have a source of such things.


It does seem likely that food is transported from the mainland, nonetheless. (As indeed other essentials may be). A rocky island in the middle of a freezing ocean is a poor location in which to grow crops, and one wonders whether the Dementors would be particularly inclined to do so in any case.


One more thing to keep in mind is that Azkaban is terribly inhumane. No one needs to cook food. Just drop off some bread and water and the Dementors can give it to the prisoners. Clean blankets? The prisoners will be lucky if they ever get a replacement, or perhaps even a blanket at all.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

languages - Do we ever see written English in the Star Wars films?

In Empire Strikes Back , we see a transcription of what R2's beeps and bloops mean, but it's not English (sorry for the low quality, it's from the 2004 DVDs): I'd assume it's what Basic looks like when written, but is there some point in the the Star Wars films we see written English instead? (This sort of spun off from a discussion in How do people understand astromech droids? .) Answer At one point there was English but it has been phased out in subsequent versions of the films. Chris Gould at DVD Active did a comparison of all versions of each of the Star Wars films, and in his comparison of Episode 4 , there are a couple of screenshots showing how the power gauge for the Death Star tractor beam was changed. I imagine there are probably more to be found in his other comparisons but I haven't got around to reading those yet.

Was the "pure soul" of Harry's what had really hurt Voldemort?

In the Order of the Phoenix, Voldemort possesses Harry, and it hurts. Greatly. I think that Dumbledore explained that it was because Voldemort's rotten soul was incapable of assimilating Harry's pure soul, that Voldemort didn't understand the love and friendship etc that Harry has in his heart. But, I think it was a lie. Remember that in Deathly Hallows, while looking for information regarding Horcruxes, it is discovered that it is in fact possible to merge a soul fragment back, but that the process was extremely painful. Now then, if Voldemort tried to possess Harry, and Harry had a fragment of Voldemort's soul, I think that it could have been the true cause of Voldemort's pain: the fact of having his soul so close of another fragment. I think that Dumbledore knew that fact, but had to lie to Harry because it was inappropriate to let him know that he had one of Voldemort's soul fragments at the moment. Is that right? Or was it truly the pure soul of Harry's...

star wars - What "exactly" happens when someone turns to the Dark Side?

When I saw the original Star Wars saga as a kid, the concept of the Dark Side imprinted in me was quite simple. You did a bad thing, so you're a bad person so you go to the Dark Side and keep doing bad things. Now, obviously this doesn't hold true in reality. In my mind it is perfectly reasonable for Luke to kill the Emperor and Vader and then just flee the Death Star and rejoin the Alliance. After all they are at war, those are enemy officers that have captured him and are taunting him by threatening with death of all loved ones and the whole operation was intended to kill the Emperor anyway. The same would hold true for Anakin. He could have killed Mace Windu to save the Chancellor and Padme but that doesn't mean he's going to then go mad and kill all Jedis including children. It doesn't add up from a merely psychological point of view. He had a set of objectives and that made him want to keep the Chancellor alive (quite valid by the way, Mace Windu is quite clums...

star trek - Warning regarding forward saucer section in Nemesis?

In Star Trek: Nemesis , just before the Enterprise rams into the Scimitar, Picard sends a text message from his captain's chair arm pad to Troi — who is manning the helm in lieu of the crewman who was just blown out through what was once the view screen — indicating that she should put full impulse on standby. (Literally, if you watch the scene closely, Troi's console prefaces the order with "TXT MSG" !) My question is: Did Picard also somehow warn crew members in the forward saucer section about what was about to happen? The ramming of the Scimitar was a heat of the moment decision. Considering that he also resorted to calling the auto-destruct sequence shortly after (which ended up being offline), he probably was of the mindset that any losses would be acceptable in order to hault Shinzon's march to Earth. Still, I'm curious. Answer The original script indicates that he called for the crew to " brace for impact ". Whether that call (or the comma...