a penal/justice system.  >.<  sending people to asteroid mines is so overdone.

i want to keep a storyline open for bounty hunters, but
that would mean ruffians out on bail.

It must have been a longer week than I realized. I read that steroid mine, which, while might make for an interesting local, I don't think it would work for a penal colony.

lol  well, if the miners are doing roids, shrunken penals less than interesting 

tvtropes for clues about penal colonies

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSevenBasicPlots

So, you need a unique environment to use as a penal colony/prison for your story?

Well, asteroid mines are presumably dangerous places. So maybe you want a place that has inherent danger?

Prison/hard labour/danger?  interesting indeed.

What about the benefit to the local economy?

Chain gangs build roads, break rocks, pick up litter from motorways/freeways on Earth.

Out in space? Asteroids contain minerals that can be sold - been there, done that as you said.

Perhaps a penal colony that collects ice from the rings of a nearby planet that are sent to another planet that has little water?

Stargate:Universe - the TV series - featured a space ship that collected something by diving close to a star/sun to fill its fuel tanks.

Perhaps a penal colony that earns its keep by piloting containers to the local star to collect energy/something that can be used by the local inhabited world?

If a group of prisoners escape using the 'mining' ships/tankers then a bounty hunter is employed to catch them?

Just my way of processing ideas........I hope this helps.

thanks.

read hours of tvtropes this morning.  didn't help much. sigh

What if there are no prisons? What if it is somewhat similiar to the origins of Australia? Perhaps they are sent in a 'one-way' colony ship to the furthest and most desolate planets of the galaxy to colonize? No guards, no government or leaders. What they do on their little barren worlds is all up to them. Some might steal the colony ships and return. Some might make a horrible little world. Some might build great civilizations.

The thing about space stuff is always the expense (even rich cultures have to expend money or its equivalent on moving mass from one gravity well to another, and if not money then at least energy.)  One of the things that could make such a penal system interesting would be something that would justify sending prisoners out there.  Asteroid mines and such don't make sense because robots are cheaper and you don't have to feed them or keep them alive in order to work.  There could be such places that don't rely on mining.  One possibility is to maybe send criminals somewhere far enough to be "safe" but close enough to justify the expense of sending them there.  Maybe criminals can become involuntary organ donors, but not in the traditional sense...maybe they can be sent somewhere, hooked up to super-advance "galactomatic" technology that keeps them alive while organs are harvested: one criminial, can--for example--be placed in a kind of regeneration vat that's programmed to keep that particular criminal on the kidney assembly line for the length of their prison term...whenever one of his/her kidneys is harvested, he/she begins growing a new one (which gets harvested in turn, and so on and so on and so on).  Just an idea.  Such technology can, after all, be fiddled with in such a way as to cause all kinds of nefarious derring-do; maybe a particular criminal or group of criminals can figure out a way to fiddle with the machinery from inside and thus, escape, and give bounty hunters a reason to get up in the planet-relative morning...

Organ harvesting/transplanting of criminals can lead to recepients developing traits of the criminals, in sense, they become criminals commiting the same time of crimes as a side effect of the regeneration process.

The organ harversting not as common as asteroid mining.

Truth testing telepaths, don't really need juries to decide guilt or not verdicts.

Murderers are fed to Dragons.

but, all the crimes in between?

There are so many directions to go in...I think anything with organ harvesting, disease-cure testing, etc. will keep things somewhat current in terms of what a lot of more contemporary sf/f readers are looking for.  And it doesn't have to be limited to organ harvesting, you could go the Frank Herbert route and with some female criminals (for high crimes at least) they could function as...well...birth machines.  It's a bit grim and I suspect that is something that could open a whole 'nother pandora's box.

Don't forget a prison on an asteroid or small moon.  But if you go that route, make sure it's an asteroid/moon with strong gravity (see my story "Escape" in the writers gallery for an explanation of why.

just remembered the 'escape from ny' movie.

fortress

was a bunch of prison themed movies

Organ harvesting has already been done. It was a feature of a TV movie/series that I forget the title of.

Everything has "already been done". Question is, has is been done to death?

And of course, its all in the presentation. Sorry I have no helpful suggestions myself ATM, but I'll think about it.

Originality wins over already been done every time, but it can be fun to come up with new takes on an old idea.

One of my favorite "unique punishment stories is "Cage of Brass" by Samuel R. Delany...in which "getting better" is the punishment.  Essentially, the central character was convicted of a crime and placed in a life support vat but with full sensory deprivation.  He essentially went crazy and that was the punishment, if he did anything to harm himself, the life support system would simply kick in and fix him.  In the logic of this story, mind-numbingly boring immortality was the punishment, as it led to a kind of self-aware insanity.  Basically it was a story looking at the psychological and emotional implications of extended solitary confinement.  That's an idea that hasn't really been pursued very much, and some element of that is likely to work in what you're interested in.  I guess, the main question is: what element of the plot is best served by a non-typical punishment?  Because I have my doubts about the whole crime/punishment thing, I'm always interested in how the two things don't really match.  I mean, what if a person is innocent and there's a flaw in the system?  That question has served me in all 1 or 2 crime/punishment stories I've written, but again, it all boils down to what you want to say and what best helps you say it.