In high school we had one guy who was a bit of a sore loser, so I can see the guards not being remotely interested in getting in the middle of any gaming disputes. As the corrections officer quoted in the article stated mentioned, DnD is good for almost all people. What we have here is an abstraction of the gun control argument, if its good or harmless for 99% of the population, then we must ban DnD because one nutcase will flip the table and shank someone, probably the DM/GM. Back to my high school, the sore loser kid actually did punch the DM in the nose when they were both high school juniors, after the DM TPK'd the party because one of the other guys flirted with his girlfriend and the sore loser guy was indignant about being punished for it, yet people wonder why I didn't play DnD in high school with those guys...
As May wrote in the article, DnD was banned much as gambling was banned on premises at my high school, but as long as nothing bad happened and the participants were good people the ban was not enforced. The situation they're trying to avoid is inmate A shanks inmate B because B stole his heroin, and in the investigation, he's not dumb enough to mention H but is smart enough to ramble about B's chaotic evil necromancer screwing over the team (and what would you expect, anyway?). Likewise I grew up before Columbine when it was "normal" to build levels in FPS matching your school blueprint because, hey, we all know our school layout and there ARE some good camping points, and this is number 311613 on the list of fun things to do when I was young that would get you swatted or at least arrested today, back then if you weren't a screw up they complimented your obvious skill at possibly getting into CAD drafting. Anyway in a similar manner if players run the Rise of the Runelords campaign they're almost certainly in the clear, but if they make something up where the characters kill the wife or kid of castle guard X and then gloat about it and have a big laugh, then real world corrections officer coincidentally also named X is inevitably going to flip the table when he finds out regardless if its permitted or not and a documented policy that RPGs is prohibited is just the usual thin blue line stuff.
Pariahdog119's advice about simply play any RPG except the famous DnD, was also helpful in 80s public school. The more rules lawyerly kids who signed a pledge at church to never play DnD to prevent the devil from stealing their soul or whatever, were chill about the zillions of almost-clones of DnD that existed. The only name I remember from that era was "Castle Perilous" and it had a yellow cover with a pretty amazing ink drawing on the cover. And via the magic of google I found a link to a picture. I probably haven't seen that book in 35 years or so. Pretty wild. Oddly enough I don't remember any of my public school textbooks but I remember "Castle Perilous" LOL. In that book there is a dungeon raid and I DMed it with some friends and my now long since deceased grandfather, insisted on playing with us to make sure I wasn't up to anything inappropriate as he had heard of the DnD controversy, and he ended up enjoying the RPG experience greatly, and in retrospect I wish I had invited him to other RPG games. That was probably about 1982 or so.
http://tomeoftreasures.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=18708&sid=3...