what do you think, compared to my first version of Trypticon Prison?

Oh, there are some individuals among their number worthy of the name, but the majority are a particularly pitiful lot, even by the low standards of the Autobots. Cybertronians were made for conquest, for combat, for glory. Real Cybertronians do not fight with mere tools or holographic tricks; they do not delegate the burden of combat to an army of lobotomized children, they do not allow their defeated enemies to reconsolidate power and territory as a cumbersome democracy drags their citizens down under its weight.

Dear Stockade Scrutinizer,

The Stockade was a common slang term for what was more properly designated "Cybertropolis Detention Center".

Unlike Trypticon Prison, the Stockade wasn't designed to hold prisoners of war. Instead its inmates were Autobots who had performed actions that were judged to aid and abet their Decepticon enemies. As such, while it was supposedly less secure than Trypticon, the inmates often got worse treatment. As Padlock, one of the guards, once put it: "With Decepticons you know where you are, but corrupt Autobots? Who can trust 'em."

I am pleased to note that this viewpoint wasn't shared by all Autobots. For example, Mirage was a constant thorn in the side of Ultra Magnus and his successor, offering pro-bono legal defence and arguing in the courts for the overturning of many sentences. It was thanks to his efforts that Groove and Bigmos were able to avoid ending up in the Stockade.

Dear No-Nonsense Nemesis,

Perhaps moreso than any other Decepticon, Trypticon had suffered greatly for the cause—robbed of his freedom, then his robot mode, then his conscious mind, this Titan had spent millennia trapped in his own lifeless body. But with the end of the war, Cybertron’s provisional government agreed that they would do what they could to restore him to functionality. Under the auspices of the provisional government, Trypticon’s body was relocated to ruins of Kaon; there, his body became a temporary shelter and power source while construction teams laboured to restore the city to its former glory. Determined to live up to his new Autobot insignia and make good, Knock Out supervised the therapy process (while Ratchet supervised Knock Out), doing what he could to repair the Titan’s mind; it was decided that, once Trypticon had been restored to sentience, it would be his decision as to whether or not he wanted to stay on Cybertron, or leave to seek his own destiny among the stars.

But this optimistic future would not come to pass—once Cyclonus staged his coup and took power, he had the pair forcibly reassigned from repair duty and refitted the downed ship into “Trypticon Prison”, a maximum-security penitentiary for war criminals, malcontents, and other Decepticons who refused to abide by terms of the Autobot-Decepticon peace treaty, including the surviving members of the Combaticons and the Constructicons. Of course, this was merely a pretense: Cyclonus and his operatives in the government saw this prison as a way to smuggle these Decepticons back to Cybertron under false pretenses and build up a powerbase of highly trained veterans that would head his burgeoning neo-Decepticon empire.

Dear Redemption Researcher,

Indeed so—the Great War in that universe was a particularly destructive affair, and by the end of the long, long conflict many Decepticons had grown just as weary as their Autobot brethren. When Optimus Prime sacrificed himself to heal Cybertron, plenty of Decepticons landed in rusted warships and battered refugee vessels and promptly surrendered. As more and more Decepticon prisoners piled up, Ultra Magnus sought the services of the ex-Decepticon Tomb to establish a bipartisan commission to try and reintegrate what Decepticons they could into society. The Vehicons, for instance, had never been allowed to choose their side, and were acquitted of all crimes. Other pardoned Decepticons included Hotwire, Hoverbolt, Ursa Major, and Doomwings, who publicly renounced the Decepticon cause before settling into peaceful civilian lives.

Not all Decepticons could be so easily dealt with, however—in the weeks that followed Bulkhead and Arcee worked together to crack down on armed splinter cells, fanatic remnants of the Decepticon military who refused to believe that Megatron had surrendered, and bizarre underground cults that venerated Megatron as a living god. For those Decepticons who refused to lay down arms, the Autobots were forced to repurpose a number of civilian transport vessels into heavily-armed prison ships, intended to transport them to a distant prison colony in the Elba system—the worst of the worst, irredeemable ‘bots like Tarn, Turmoil, Heretech, Demolishor, or Deathsaurus. 

Unfortunately, like so many other Autobot plans, this institution would be hijacked by Cyclonus; once he’d infiltrated the provisional government and launched his coup that saw the Autobot ousted from the system they’d sought to build, the new High Council promptly began targeting and imprisoning all ‘bots who had ever worn the Decepticon badge, regardless of whether or not they’d renounced Decepticonism, loading them up onto prison ships and taking them off Cybertron… while also removing Cyclonus’s would-be rival Steeljaw from power. Common gangsters and street criminals would be scooped up and rebranded as “Decepticons”, overexaggerating the degree by which the Decepticons had infiltrated their society to keep the citizens of Cybertron paranoid.