Bootlegger Ed Carson is sent to prison. His old gang turns from liquor (now legal) to kidnapping. When they nab the son and daughter-in-law of the judge who sent Carson to prison, he is paroled to help in the capture.
A blue-collar worker on New York's depressed waterfront finds his life changed after he saves a woman attempting suicide.
After killing a prison guard, convict Robert Stroud faces life imprisonment in solitary confinement. Driven nearly mad by loneliness and despair, Stroud's life gains new meaning when he happens upon a helpless baby sparrow in the exercise yard and nurses it back to health. Despite having only a third grade education, Stroud goes on to become a renowned ornithologist and achieves a greater sense of freedom and purpose behind bars than most people find in the outside world.
The amazing true story of Billy Moore, an English boxer incarcerated in Thailand’s most notorious prison. Thrown into a world of drugs and violence, he finds his best chance to escape is to fight his way out in prison Muay Thai tournaments.
People in the future live in a totalitarian society. A technician named THX 1138 lives a mundane life between work and taking a controlled consumption of drugs that the government uses to make puppets out of people. As THX is without drugs for the first time he has feelings for a woman and they start a secret relationship.
A tormented jazz musician finds himself lost in an enigmatic story involving murder, surveillance, gangsters, doppelgängers, and an impossible transformation inside a prison cell.
An epic tale spanning forty years in the life of Celie, an African-American woman living in the South who survives incredible abuse and bigotry. After Celie's abusive father marries her off to the equally debasing 'Mister' Albert Johnson, things go from bad to worse, leaving Celie to find companionship anywhere she can. She perseveres, holding on to her dream of one day being reunited with her sister in Africa.
A death row inmate turns for spiritual guidance to a local nun in the days leading up to his scheduled execution for the murders of a young couple.
When petty criminal Luke Jackson is sentenced to two years in a Florida prison farm, he doesn't play by the rules of either the sadistic warden or the yard's resident heavy, Dragline, who ends up admiring the new guy's unbreakable will. Luke's bravado, even in the face of repeated stints in the prison's dreaded solitary confinement cell, "the box," make him a rebel hero to his fellow convicts and a thorn in the side of the prison officers.
Michel takes up pickpocketing on a lark and is arrested soon after. His mother dies shortly after his release, and despite the objections of his only friend, Jacques, and his mother's neighbor Jeanne, Michel teams up with a couple of petty thieves in order to improve his craft. With a police inspector keeping an eye on him, Michel also tries to get a straight job, but the temptation to steal is hard to resist.
Two carefree pals traveling through rural Alabama on their way back to college are mistakenly arrested and charged with murder. Fortunately, one of them has a cousin who's a lawyer - Vincent Gambini, a former auto mechanic from Brooklyn who has just passed his bar exam after his sixth try. When he arrives with his leather-clad girlfriend to try his first case, it's a real shock - for him and the Deep South!
The Limey follows Wilson, a tough English ex-con who travels to Los Angeles to avenge his daughter's death. Upon arrival, Wilson goes to task battling Valentine and an army of L.A.'s toughest criminals, hoping to find clues and piece together what happened. After surviving a near-death beating, getting thrown from a building and being chased down a dangerous mountain road, the Englishman decides to dole out some bodily harm of his own.
An old gangster is advised that Freddie Mays would leave jail after thirty years in prison. His mood changes and he recalls when he was a young punk and who joined Freddie's gang—a man he both envied and ultimately betrayed.
The story of Bobby Sands, the IRA member who led the 1981 hunger strike during The Troubles in which Irish Republican prisoners tried to win political status.
The story of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a boxer wrongly imprisoned for murder, and the people who aided in his fight to prove his innocence.
A young shoemaker is arrested for stealing a small amount of money, and is jailed for fifteen years. Upon his release, he wants to get a permit to get a job and start anew, but finds that without a job he can't get a permit, and without a permit he can't get a job. Ensnared in the absurd net of Prussian bureaucracy, he can't see any way out. That is, until he enters a thrift shop and spots a Prussian officer's uniform that fits him like a second skin...
Ingo Hasselbach, whose parents were Communist Party members in East Germany during his childhood, has lived at both ends of the political seesaw. The question of how people reach a change of heart is a profound one; Hasselbach describes the external forces that led to his founding Germany's first neo-Nazi political party and the internal ones that led him away from it five years later.
In the year 2022, a ruthless prison warden has created the ultimate solution for his most troublesome and violent inmates: Absolom, a secret jungle island where prisoners are abandoned and left to die. But Marine Captain John Robbins, convicted of murdering a commanding officer, is determined to escape the island in order to reveal the truth behind his murderous actions and clear his name.
His name: infamous. His reputation: ruthless. But when James "Animal"Allen is locked up in a maximum security prison, he meets a revolutionary who changes his life. Now a reformed man, James is released only to find that his own son has assumed a life of crime and violence. Can a father haunted by his past redeem his family from the very streets he created, or will he be forced to make the ultimate sacrifice?
Disgraced ex-England football captain, Danny 'Mean Machine' Meehan, is thrown in jail for assaulting two police officers. He keeps his head down and has the opportunity to forget everything and change the lives of the prisoners. When these prisoners have the chance to put one over the evil guards during a prison football match, Danny takes the lead.