The Cage
The Waste is a land full of outlaws, and equally full of bounty hunters(some of whom aren't too far off from outlaws themselves) with the job of hunting down these outlaws for their valuable bounties. But sometimes the outlaw's brought back alive instead of dead, and then there's a bit of an issue. With how little living space there is in the Waste, to include a jail in every town would simply consume far too much area. This conundrum eventually resulted in the Cage, a massive jail situated inside a serpentine wastebone, its titular ribcage stretching on for over a thousand feet.
Purpose / Function
The Cage exists to imprison all the outlaws brought in by bounty hunters who, either by request of the one who issued the bounty or by their own moral code, choose not to shoot their targets dead. Grouping all these dangerous criminals together may seem like a recipe for disaster, and in a way it is, but it also makes watching over them so much easier, and a lot of those people are surprisingly useless without a gun in their hands anyways. The Cage is home to one of the most experienced guard forces in the Waste, and while breakouts have occurred in the past they have retaliated with such crushing force that staying inside almost seems like the better option to many prisoners.
Architecture
The Wastebone the Cage is built upon once belonged to some massive variety of snake, coiled upon itself. The prisoners are all kept within its ribcage, monitored from outside by a large force of experienced guards, many of them ex-bounty hunters themselves. Modifications to the wastebone include the addition of a wooden floor, so that the prisoners don't stand directly on the Sands, making themselves targets for the creatures that dwell beneath, and so that guards can walk along a platform on the outside of the ribs. Additionally, while the myriad thick stone ribs already serve as bars, some are thin and rather fragile and actual metal bars have been included as well. The wastebone has also been partitioned into cells, to avoid cooperation and organization among prisoners. Finally, large chunks of wastebone have been carted in from elsewhere, forming platforms upon which guard stations and living areas for guards have been built.
Type
Prison
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Very cool. The ancient skeletons as settlement idea is amazing in general, and I quite like how you've considered the impact that would have how settlements deal with things like prisoners. If you don't know about it yet, I highly recommend the tooltip BBCode for explaining in-world terms like wastebone. (I first interpreted it as bone that was left over from other construction, which didn't make sense as I read the rest of the article.) You can find an example of its syntax and what it looks like in the world anvil codex. Specifically this article (which also contains a lot of other cool formatting tools): https://www.worldanvil.com/w/WorldAnvilCodex/a/bbcode
I'm planning on incorporating bbcode and all that jazz once I've built up my world more, added all the articles I'll be frequently linking to. I have a lot of those so far, but certainly not all of them.
I totally understand that approach - in many ways it's one I use as well. That said, these projects have a way of growing - my original concept for Irion was based almost entirely around a conflict over a mining region on the border of two powerful kingdoms (one of which is now a republic). But a good chunk of summer camp this year was spent developing a civilization that lives at the bottom of the ocean that probably hasn't even heard of this conflict. And my world is small compared to some people's. I wouldn't count on there being a point where you're done with building the world and it's time to make it start looking pretty and have articles interlinked. But...this is definitely a case where I should take my own advice, too.