The Sofia Rotterdamned Asylum for the Criminally Insane, typically called Rotterdamned Asylum or simply Rotterdamned, is a psychiatric hospital for criminals housing patients who are criminally insane. Rotterdamned's high-profile patients are often well known non meta power supervillains.
Rotterdamned Asylum has a poor security record and high recidivism rate, at least with regard to the high-profile cases—patients, are frequently shown escaping at will—and those who are considered to no longer be mentally unwell and discharged tend to re-offend. Furthermore, several staff members, including its founder, have become mentally unwell. In addition, prisoners with unusual medical conditions that prevent them from staying in a regular prison are housed in Rotterdamned. Rotterdamned, with special conditions required for certain patients or inmates being a regularity rather than an exception, is seen by authorities to be an ideal location under certain circumstances. Serving as the city's psychiatric hospital, Rotterdamned Asylum has a long and brutal history, beginning when its own architect became mentally unwell and hacked his workers to death with an axe. He was convicted and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in the same asylum he had been building. Since the 1920s, Rotterdamned Asylum has been destroyed, usually violently, on multiple occasions and rebuilt or expanded; for those patients with unique security or health considerations, customized facilities have been installed at considerable expense, such as a refrigerated cell for Mr. Freeze. The asylum has continued to grow larger and more modern in appearance, although as the lion's share of the budget is devoted to security treatment options have inevitably suffered. Despite the installation of advanced technological security measures in the era of metahuman criminals, the inmates have still been able to escape or take control of the facilities from time to time.
Despite its status as a private hospital in the mainstream DC Universe, Rotterdamned is also granted certain legislative privileges by the city. For example, the city law empowers the asylum to unilaterally detain any person or persons under indefinite psychiatric observation. Said individuals cannot be institutionalized through formal means without the consent of their families or the judicial system, but they can be held for any period at the director's discretion. This loophole has allowed Rotterdamned to incarcerate specific characters, while circumventing the bureaucratic process normally associated with institutionalization. A number of other states and cities have transferred dangerously insane supervillains to Rotterdamned Asylum despite its rather discouraging reputation, either because they lack facilities of their own to hold them, or find it easier to dump their criminal problem elswhere.
Rotterdamned Asylum on the exterior, is a caricature of
an insane asylum: a gigantic, gated Victorian home on a dark and stormy night.
The image of the run-down, dreary building contrasts nicely with the individuals
caged within. The disorienting and mazelike atmosphere to Rotterdamned's interior is intentional, engineered to confuse the inmates so even if
they escaped their cells, they would find it difficult maintaining a sense of
direction and leaving the building. CCTV cameras are installed in every
room and at periodic intervals in every corridor. Exterior windows are
fitted with heat and motion detectors, while magnetic foil insulation in the
walls helped jam suspicious signal reception in the cell blocks.