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[neblime]

to be honest I don't think you should worry about how many you can keep alive, just throw them in a hole and throw as much food and drink after them as you can manage and see how it goes down there. 
my two cents though is that minecarts would definitely make this easier, if you somehow had time to set it all up before migrants started coming (but thats where the chuck them in a hole and forget solution comes in handy)

[Urist_McGamer]

Can't have a prison without a supermax cell block or death row, you know. A way to deal with riots (tantrum spirals) would also be beneficial.

[Xazo-Tak]

If so you might be able to free your guards from much of their day to day maintenance duties by just putting a load of turkeys down with the prisoners as their primary food source.

You worded that right.

[Panando]

I think the problem with this challenge is it's too easy. Dwarves can produce so much food through farming or butchery. Heck you could even make a squad of two from the starting seven, give them full steel, and have them as career military. That would leave only 5 for supporting the prisoners, but the elite two military would obliterate the vast majority of nasties adding nicely to the robustness of the fortress. Heck if you want a real challenge, make 6 of the starting seven full-time military and let the last dwarf do everything for everyone forever (except fight).

[Randy Gnoman]

I've run a prison fort before, but didn't totally prohibit prisoners from doing any work.  They just got crappy jobs, had to fork over all of their products to the administrator through a chute (and received food through a chute), and were mostly dependent on the guards for food (they did have a butcher's chop, and occasionally managed to slaughter one of the monsters that wandered into the prison—this was back in the day of cave rivers, and their main source of water was a cave river, which was also a source of giant olms and cave crocodiles, although mostly this meant dead prisoners and not fresh meat). 

The limiting factor was not food.  The limiting factor was violence: a large population, in cramped quarters, with little booze and no beds, quickly descends into chaos. 

I think my peak prisoner population was around 50 dwarves.  A cave crocodile attack took care of that: the initial carnage killed something like 10-15 dwarves (they were mostly unarmed, besides a few with picks), and pretty much all of the prisoners were friends, so a tantrum spiral quickly followed.  By the arrival of the next wave of prisoners, the prison halls were empty but for corpses, cave monsters, and vermin.  The only surviving dwarf in the place was a prisoner who had gone berserk and somehow ended up in a cage trap.  I installed her near the entrance, as a greeter.

If you do dwarven justice right, food should not be the limiting factor.

[noodle0117]

1-2 "escorts" with each wave of "prisoners"

That actually sounds like a pretty neat idea.

I have no idea how minecarts work (haven't played DF in years). Can they somehow be automated to become a drop-off/gathering point?

[i2amroy]

Well, he said migrants would be prisoners.  The starting seven will eventually create at least one mated pair, and thus offspring.  In theory you could get two pairs, which might be enough to form a viable breeding pool (can't brain enough for the math right now, but it might need four pairs for it to work).

It's fully possible to grow full sized fortresses just from the offspring of the starting dwarves (though it takes quite a while in vanilla DF). You can almost always end up with 3 pairs of dwarves assuming you take the proper steps (communal bedroom and a fairly small dining room) to ensure socialization between them.

[Rakonas]

People are talking about minecarts and stuff, all you need to do is have a little retracting bridge over the hole going into the migrant area. place a prepared meal stockpile or dump over it and then just open it occasionally. This wouldn't take many hauling hours at all.

[greycat]

People are talking about minecarts and stuff, all you need to do is have a little retracting bridge over the hole going into the migrant area. place a prepared meal stockpile or dump over it and then just open it occasionally. This wouldn't take many hauling hours at all.

Dumping items into the prisoner area isn't hard.  Dumping items into the prisoner area without killing prisoners is the hard bit, especially if you try to automate it.  The discussion has been about ways to prevent prisoner deaths from falling items, with or without automation of the dumping.

[Rakonas]

You can just restrict the tile under the bridge.

[greycat]

You can just restrict the tile under the bridge.

That isn't what "restrict" means.  Restricted traffic just means "if you step here it costs you 25 points in your A* algorithm" (or some large number of points).  Restricted traffic will not stop dwarves stepping on a given spot, if that spot is part of the only path to their destination, or if that spot is their destination (e.g. because you dropped some booze there and now they want to pick it up).

[GavJ]

People are talking about minecarts and stuff, all you need to do is have a little retracting bridge over the hole going into the migrant area. place a prepared meal stockpile or dump over it and then just open it occasionally. This wouldn't take many hauling hours at all.

Dumping items into the prisoner area isn't hard.  Dumping items into the prisoner area without killing prisoners is the hard bit, especially if you try to automate it.  The discussion has been about ways to prevent prisoner deaths from falling items, with or without automation of the dumping.

Doesn't sound that hard. Short hallway of pressure plates, if any of them are depressed by dwarves, leave the door open below and bridge extended above (ideally with a short delay from bridge to door to allow falling time of any last minute items). If none depressed, open bridge and lock door.

[Rakonas]

You can just restrict the tile under the bridge.

That isn't what "restrict" means.  Restricted traffic just means "if you step here it costs you 25 points in your A* algorithm" (or some large number of points).  Restricted traffic will not stop dwarves stepping on a given spot, if that spot is part of the only path to their destination, or if that spot is their destination (e.g. because you dropped some booze there and now they want to pick it up).

None of those things are relevant if we're talking about a few tiles in the center of a big prison area. Dwarves will path out of it so long as there's no supplies there. When there's no supplies there is when you would actually drop stuff in.

[greycat]

None of those things are relevant if we're talking about a few tiles in the center of a big prison area. Dwarves will path out of it so long as there's no supplies there. When there's no supplies there is when you would actually drop stuff in.

That assumes you are manually choosing when to drop stuff in, rather than setting up some sort of automatic "dumps every 3 days" system.

[laularukyrumo]

That actually sounds like a pretty good plan.

Would be trivial to set up a tiny minecart route at the top of the chute, with a food stockpile that feeds into the minecart. Have a track stop on the loading square at max friction, a second track stop with no friction and dump-on-arrival adjacent to the pit itself, and a hatch cover near the bottom of the chute to minimize falling time. Whenever the cart gets full, someone comes by and pushes it. It'll go in a circle, dump its goods, and return to the loading square to be loaded again. Meanwhile, you've got an airlock around the dump square using retracting bridges (because a 1-z drop is nonfatal and cannot be jammed by dwarves in the middle of hauling) that are all linked to a cyclic repeater system. Time it out so that every couple days, the machines retract the bridges to cut off pathing, wait for a bit, then open the hatch long enough to dump all the food onto the source tile. Then, have a food stockpile on that tile, set to feed into the main stockpile. If you used minecarts there, you could drastically cut the time spent physically hauling, which allows the source tile to be depleted rapidly and reduces risk of injury and rotting.