Crime and Punishment

[Sarisa]

One bit of civilized infrastructure is, as far as I can recall, missing in the Mushroom Kingdom: the jail. By which I mean a place to hold criminals for a while so they can't flee or commit crimes while awaiting trial and punishment. Dungeons for holding kidnapped prisoners of conscience don't count. The Mushroom Kingdom also lacks any sort of justice system.

Is this a case of conservation of detail? Isle Delfino does have a jail and judge trials because they're relevant to the plot, and Rogueport has a gallows in the town square, but within the MK Mario is above suspicion and building a prison that could hold Bowser requires technologies last seen in Star Trek. (IMO, you'd need a force field, because Bowser can break any wall made of ordinary matter.)

I find it hard to believe that the MK is so completely peaceful that there is no need for any sort of criminal justice. Jr. Troopa, Kent C. Koopa, and the Koopa Bros. are native troublemakers, and deserve some sort of punishment. But I have no idea what sort of punishment they may be given, or how to build a jail cell to hold prisoners that can fly, throw hammers at the guards, cast spells, or punch through walls. They can't all be let out with the expectation they'll quietly return for trial (especially the flying ones), even if imprisonment isn't a punishment in use in the MK. Does anyone have any ideas or observations I forgot?

[kingkoopa]

Perhaps some of the paintings in Peach's castle are prisons. Kind of like throw a whole bunch of prisoners into a pocket dimension. Some seem worse than others and certainly all of them can't be prisons but perhaps Lethal Lava Land and maybe Shifting Sand Land are? It would explain why they're filled with Bowser's mooks.

[Koopalmier]

The paintings are gates to worlds Bowser created, and haven't been seen since Mario 64, so eh.

Considering we got Mushroom City, which is a big city à la Tokyo or NYC, I'd say it's likely the MK laws are also similar to ours. But the area around Peach's castle is a strange case, as there are only a couple small villages, no policemen (well you got the castle's guards, but it's obvious from SMG that they're not less cowards than everyone else) and criminality is easy (when troubles like Kent C. Koopa pop up, people just go through it instead of trying to fix it).

I'd say pretty much everyone in the kingdom counts on Mario and Luigi now anyway.