In the future of 2022, the international prison system has been entirely subverted by corporate interests, transforming incarceration into a lucrative global business. The world is depicted as a place where the state has ceded authority to private entities, leading to the creation of Absolom, a secret jungle island where the most dangerous or "unprofitable" prisoners are dumped to survive or perish without oversight. While the film focuses on the primitive struggle on the island, the established society outside is shown to utilize high-speed monorails and massive, fortress-like penitentiaries.

Societally, the film presents a world of extreme class and moral segregation. On Earth, technology is used primarily for control and surveillance, including biometric tracking and genetic profiling to predict criminal behavior. The environment on the mainland appears arid and industrial, suggesting a world where nature has been paved over in favor of brutalist infrastructure. Interestingly, the film features an exclusively male cast, implying a future where penal colonies (and perhaps the administrative systems governing them) are strictly segregated by gender, or that women occupy a different, unseen tier of this dystopian social order.

The film’s most accurate prediction was the rise of for-profit prison corporations, a trend that accelerated significantly between the film's release and its 2022 setting. However, its technological vision is a mix of hits and misses; while it features holographic wardens and sophisticated mind-monitoring sensors, the interfaces remain grounded in the 1990s aesthetic of bulky CRT monitors and text-heavy command lines. A notable narrative "prediction" occurs in the protagonist's backstory, which cites a fictionalized military incident in Benghazi in 2011—a bizarrely specific coincidence given the real-world events that transpired in that location that same year.