Irregular Webcomic! #2815

Yeah, that about covers it.

2025-07-04 Rerun commentary: I Googled to try to find out why prison bars are almost always vertical instead of horizontal (as in this comic), thinking I could write an interesting spiel about this... But search results are just old Quora threads (infamously unreliable for most topics), old reddit threads with random people with no idea speculating baselessly, people referring to old Quora threads and old reddit threads as though they're authoritative, and AI slop obviously generated from old Quora threads and old reddit threads.

As far as I can tell, nobody has actually given a solid, well-argued, academically supported reason. The most plausible reason I could find was that it was just easier to build them vertically with stones and mortar thousands of years ago, and by now it's just a tradition. Theres also some plausibility in the fact that people can climb on horizontal bars and use their full weight to try to bend them, but can't bring quite as much force to bear on a vertical bar (though by my trigonometrical force vector analysis, it should only be a factor of 2 or so, and one would hope prison bars have a safety factor of more than 2× built in).

Some people are saying it's because of the human visual system, which is better at processing vertical lines than horizontal ones due to our evolution as a savannah creature, and so vertical bars are more demoralising for prisoners as they inhibit our sense of humanity and freedom more than horizontal ones would. Which sounds awesome, if it were anything more than pop psychology.

Another fanciful reason I found is the assertion that people can reach further through horizontal bars than vertical ones, so you want vertical bars to prevent prisoners reaching for and grabbing the keys (presumably form a snoring guard seated just outside).

A lot of people seem to be convinced that vertical bars are cheaper because horizontal bars need to be either (a) longer, or (b) more numerous, depending on whether your cell is (a) wider, or (b) narrower than it is tall. I leave the logical inadequacies of both these arguments as an exercise for the reader.