If you walk around the prison some npcs will interact with, some wanting to offer something to you or taking something by force.
The NPCs also walk around the prison and if you are the same room as them you click look around and mess with the NPCS in the room. It's random because you depend of the NPC pathing. Beside a small icon on the mini map, like a pickaxe that means the NPC is going to mine, you can't predict their behavior.
Also, if you go to the github dev branch you can see the game is being worked almost everyday and the last updates are mostly small fixes. I imagine the 1.8 is coming soon. It will focus on transformation for what I could see but maybe they update the random encounters or the "look for trouble button" as well.