In a slight variation to the time-honoured story of the innocent man or woman in prison, this movie explores a parallel form of injustice - the sentencing of minor players in big drug busts to crushing terms of imprisonment under US federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws.

Susan Walker (Mercedes Ruehl) is a widow with two kids who falls in love with an almost-too-good-to-be -true car salesman, Russell. Apart from being a car salesman (with everything that may imply), Russell also does a little drug-dealing on the side. Susan thinks he’s doing low-level stuff and immediately gives him the boot when he breaks his promise to stop. But when he and his co-conspirators are busted soon after their break-up, Susan is also arrested for having “fed and sustained her five co-conspirators” and she is then convicted, on their evidence, of having been part of the conspiracy by (unwittingly) passing on messages or unknowingly playing some other part in the enterprise.

And there’s the rub. Under the mandatory minimum sentencing laws, Susan is regarded as having been an equal partner in the cannabis growing and distribution enterprise and, what’s more, has to watch all the others receive big discounts from the court for having provided ’substantial assistance’ to the government. Susan, the least involved, gets 20 years and the others nowhere near that; Russell gets 14.

Little else needs to be said. The laws, designed to give the drug ‘king-pins’ lengthy sentences, instead give a decided benefit to those with information to trade; the mules and low-level players with little or no information to provide (or who, like Susan, protest their innocence) finish up filling up the prisons by virtue of their huge sentences.

The film mostly resists the temptation to show how difficult it is for a middle-class(ish), innocent(ish) person in a standardly brutish jail; she’s attacked only once and the poor treatment she experiences at the hands of the guards is very minor. She spends her time writing to judges and senators seeking a new trial or a change in the law. There are plenty of others in the same predicament, including her friend Roxanne (Karen Glave). When a new chaplain (Elisa Moolecherry) starts and puts them in touch with Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM, which happily avoids the debate as to whether it should be ‘Minima’), things get going, and six years into her mandatory 20 Susan walks free, Presidential pardon in hand.

As you’d expect, the film shares a few themes with a number of other women’s prison movies, particularly Locked Up: A Mother’s Rage (1991) in its concurrent focus on Susan’s sister Angie (Alberta Watson) as she puts her life thanklessly on hold while looking after her sister’s increasingly troublesome kids. You’ve also got to like the inability of the other women (notably Roxy) to delight in Susan’s pardon - all of them unable to rise above the further injustice of just one woman, whose circumstances are not much different to their own, being set free.

While we get to return home with Susan and see her reflect on what she’s been through and overcome, it would perhaps have made the point more cogently to have stayed with the many bewildered women - still in jail, still separated from their kids, still being disproportionately punished by poor law - who she left behind.

The first half hour of this movie is taken up establishing that Martin Stang (John Hargreaves) is an armed robber and a likable rogue who knows his way around (a) dirty money, (b) clean women, and (c) the New South Wales Police (more dirty than clean). That done, the remainder of the film is able to be devoted to his great con job - convincing the court and the prison authorities that he’s blind and no longer a threat to society.

Hargreaves is terrific; wonderfully cocky on the streets, and restrained, tentative and vulnerable as he ‘loses’ his sight. And credible. After getting a reduced sentence from a Court that is dubious about his sudden unexplained blindness but can’t fault it, Martin gets moved to a minimum-security prison where the Prison Officers are, typically, downright cynical about it. He sticks to his guns, and although he trips over, he can’t be tripped up.

Along the way he is befriended by a sexually-repressed clergyman’s wife, Sarah (Judy Davis), who sets out to teach him the life skills that he will need upon release. He is given day leaves to go to her house. He knows the intimacy of a blind man’s touch. He tells her that he loves her. If we hadn’t seen him cavorting with the other women, and if we didn’t know that his blindness is all a big ruse, we might believe him. She falls for him, of course. He reveals his sightedness to her, and it becomes trickier. For everyone.

Hargreaves’ performance ensures that Hoodwink remains an unpretentious bit of fun, its tongue firmly planted in its cheek. It’s very dated; the first part, in particular, is very much locked into the late-70s, early-80s. But the scam is timeless.

Frank ‘Fast-Walking’ Miniver (James Woods) is a bent, dissolute, dope-smoking, work-avoiding guard who regards his job and his bosses with contempt. In his spare time he helps run a couple of whores out of his cousin’s general store, and just about everything he does is corrupt in one or more senses of the word. But in this grimy, dispiriting film, that doesn’t set him much apart from anyone else.

Fast-Walking’s cousin Wasco, (a miscast Tim McIntire), has just landed in jail again and has already picked up a trustee’s position; he has handy local connections. Wasco is not at all defeated by prison; rather, it provides the theatre in which he does his very best work, a bit like it does for Bronson, a generation later (and in a different way).  Wasco has a grand vision, and possesses the nous to put his plans into action. He takes over the prison drug distribution… in fact, if it’s drugs, money, murder, race exploitation or any other racket in the prison, Wasco is soon behind it - helped by his sister on the outside, some key guards on the inside, and his beautiful girl, Moke (Kay Lenz), who Fast-Walking sleazes on to in the time-honoured way.

Enter William Galliot (Robert Hooks), an African-American civil rights activist, whose arrival in the jail causes a minor commotion. Fast-Walking soon gets put in a difficult position; cousin Wasco has a commercial interest in him being killed, and Galliot and his people on the outside put $50,000 on the table to arrange his escape. Both plans rely on Fast-Walking, corruptible and a crack shot. These are the sorts of dilemmas that correctional officers often face.

It’s not uplifting. It retains one’s interest through its twists and turns and because, against one’s better judgment, one vaguely sides with the reprobate Fast-Walking over all the other reprobates. Perhaps Fast-Walking’s casual seediness is ultimately more palatable than the more organised view of the corrupt world that which Wasco espouses.

Fast-Walking was shot, in part, on location at the Old Montana Territorial Prison in Deer Lodge, and it provides a terrific backdrop to the action. The prison’s operations were contracted out in 1890 (does this make it one of the earliest private prisons?) and it closed in 1979.

Diana Dors. Prison movie. They don’t seem to go together naturally, do they?

But here, in this drama based very loosely on the real life case of Ruth Ellis (the last woman executed in Britain) and renamed ‘Blonde Sinner‘ for the US market, Dors does an adequate job as Mary Hilton, the blonde bombshell condemned to die for the murder of her boyfriend’s lover. Hilton doesn’t just knock off a rival; the man with whom she was in love, Jim (Michael Craig), had already killed himself after being rejected by Lucy, the woman whom he loved, when Hilton goes out and calmly squares the ledger. Ellis, on the other hand, killed one of her several lovers; curiously, she and Dors both appeared in Lady Godiva Rides Again (1951), four years before her hanging.

It’s a very different Death Row movie. Hilton lives in a big room which she shares with the two prison officers who guard her round the clock, with another posted just outside the door. She is not left alone for a minute and has to sleep with the light on, presumably so that if she tries to thwart the hangman by killing herself first, the officers can see enough of her to keep her alive enough to be killed. Her wait (for a reprieve) is tense. Her relationships with those who visit her (notably her mother and her first husband) are fraught. Her relationships with those who guard her, notably the emotionally-invested Hilda MacFarlane (Yvonne Mitchell), are all that she has left.

It’s not a great movie. Despite her sultry looks and her unrequited passion for Jim, Hilton is played as very controlled (coolly leaving her first husband who had done her no wrong, coldly tracking and shooting her rival dead, silently pushing her family away and passively waiting for her appointment with the hangman), and it’s hard to feel much sympathy for her. Most of the prison officers, on the other hand, seem jolly decent types, eh?  Ruth Ellis’s execution brought about a surge in the campaign to end capital punishment. It’s hard to see film-goers desperately clamouring to save Mary Hilton, although I have no doubt that’s how we’re supposed to react.

Sure, her wait to die is a little tense, but I was untroubled when she became past tense.

It’s bit surprising that there aren’t more prison boot camp movies, given the potential (brutally exploited in movies like Full Metal Jacket) to show tough men being bullied, abused and humiliated. That potential really is within easy grasp of the prison movie genre.

It is the territory of First Time Felon. The film is based on the real life story of Greg Yance (played here by an impassive Omar Epps), successful drug dealer and high-ranking member of the Vice Lords gang in Chicago. He gets pinched in possession of a largish quantity of heroin, and is sent down for 5 years - but as he is a ‘non-violent first-time felon’ he is given the option of doing a 120-day boot camp program (and then probation) instead. Not surprisingly, he opts for the boot camp.

The camp, euphemistically known as the ‘Impact Incarceration Program’, is all that you would expect; correctional officers getting into the faces of the inmates, indiscriminate abuse, tough discipline, arbitrary punishments and no tolerance for individuality or questioning of the approach. Leading the assault by the officers is Sergeant Calhoun (Delroy Lindo), who is on a personal mission to remind all the African American inmates that it is they who oppress their brothers by selling them drugs and condemning the black community to lives of disadvantage, crime and under-achievement, and that they cannot claim disadvantage and oppression as an excuse. Sometimes it gets too personal for Calhoun and he over-exuberantly over-steps the mark.

Much of Yance’s story is pretty standard prison movie fare: he is exposed to violence first-hand in the jail, then at the camp is paired with rival gang member Tyrone and is forced to work with him. A team from the camp is sent to help the small Illinois town of Niota during the Mississippi floods of 1993, and they win the respect and gratitude of the local townsfolk. On release, though, he finds the going tough; he steadfastly refuses to get back into his former criminal ways but receives knock-back after knock-back when he seeks legitimate work. He hits rock bottom; his friend Pookie is gunned down and dies in his arms, he starts drinking to excess and becomes suicidal. One hopes, perversely, that the film will surprise and not end happily, but those hopes are never going to be realised in a film such as this.

What does it tell us? It suggests that boot camps are cheaper than imprisoning men for long periods and have greater success rates; some data would suggest otherwise. It tries to tell African American gang members that they are hurting their own. It tells the wider community that it’s tough going once you’ve been in jail, and that its attitude toward ex-offenders might lead to people with less resolve than Yance falling back into criminality through desperation. And it says that if only the Mississippi could breach it banks more often, the impact on criminality could be profound.

Silviu Chiscan (George Piştereanu) is 18 and in the process of being reformed by the Romanian State. He has just 15 days of his sentence left to serve. Everything is good. He is then visited by his much younger brother, Marius, whom he had helped raise in the absence of their mother, who had seemingly found her children inconvenient whenever a new man came on the scene. That may have been quite often. Marius tells him that their mother has returned (after 8 years away) and wants to return to Italy in 7 days and take Marius with her. Silviu, up until then easy-going and likable, unravels.

He’s still very much a boy. He doesn’t want to see his brother abandoned as he was, but has no way of working through any of this heavy emotional stuff, or even articulating it. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that he, too, may have abandoned Marius by being sent to jail for several years. To add to his emotional turmoil, he becomes infatuated by a pretty student, Ana (Ada Condeescu) who’s doing some field work at the prison. And, to top it all off,  the other prisoners suspect he’s ratted on them after he was caught out-of-bounds and then released early from the punishment cells by the Prison Director (who had simply extended some leniency on extracting from Silviu a sense of his mental agitation), and have started to bastardise him. It’s a stressful few days.

His mother visits. It ends poorly; she slaps him, he shouts and calls her a whore, and the correctional staff do little to intervene in a scene that other visitors might have found a wee bit unsettling. He then attends a follow-up interview with Ana (at least he had hoped it would be Ana) - and is devastated to instead be polled by one of her male colleagues.

It all gets too much for him. He self-destructs. He punches the researcher, smashes a chair over the head of a guard, seriously injuring him, and takes Ana hostage. For her part, Ana not only has to contend with an immature, testosterone-fuelled man holding a glass shard at her throat, but also the most inept hostage-negotiation imaginable. When Silviu demands to see his mother, the Director contacts her and allows her to enter the room in which the others are holed up, unprotected and with her son not even being asked what he might give up in return. Odd.

Nonetheless, I rather liked it. I liked its authenticity. And it’s a timeless, old-fashioned tragedy; a portrait of young man incapable of dealing with all of these big things running around in his head - anger, jealousy, impotence, betrayal, the sad realisation that things are not going to turn out the way he would like - and incapable of being able to conceive of better options as he lurches towards inevitable disaster. But he does it in his own way and stays true to himself; that, importantly for Silviu, is a small victory (albeit a very, very small one).

With all the fuss about 2009’s Un Prophète being a prison movie masterpiece - if not a masterpiece in any genre - this less celebrated Spanish prison film may have been overlooked. It might not be in the same class - it’s certainly no masterpiece - but there’s an awful lot to like.

Juan Oliver (Alberto Ammann) is about to start work as a prison guard. He wants to make a good impression, so he leaves his pregnant wife and goes into work a day early, just to meet people and have a look around. His timing isn’t great; as he’s being shown around, a piece of plaster from the ceiling falls down on his head and knocks him out. He’s placed in an empty cell, Cell 211, while medical assistance is sought. Just then, a riot breaks out and his fellow guards flee, leaving him to fend for himself.

When he comes to, he thinks quickly. He gets rid of shoelaces and other things that would expose him as a non-prisoner, and coolly tells the riotous mob that he’s the new occupant of 211, in for murder. Rather improbably, he immediately earns the trust of the leader of the rioters, Malamadre (Luis Tosar), by demonstrating some sound tactical thinking (self-preservation, really, dressed up as strategy) and neat handwriting (useful for writing demands). While he may have won over the charismatic leader, Malamadre’s lieutenants are a bit more sceptical (and a touch jealous) and begin a bit of due diligence testing of the new boy’s credentials. Meanwhile, from his position of relative prominence, Juan is able to assure the prison warden and the hostage negotiator that he is OK - provided that his cover is not blown.

From that point, many Hollywood prison movies would be unable to resist the temptation have Juan single-handedly quell the riot, get all the good guys out alive, and perhaps even salvage the State’s relationship with the Basque nationalists by saving the lives of the three ETA terrorists held hostage by the rioters. Fortunately, a different path is chosen.

Juan is desperate to get out, and his desperation is only heightened by seeing his wife, Elena, on TV - being buffeted about, having stupidly put herself in the middle of an unruly crowd outside the prison gates. He is also increasingly placed in challenging situations that call upon him to act in the role of ruthless criminal in which he has cast himself, rather than as a prospective guard. At the same time we see glimpses of Malamadre’s humanity, a hint of the justness of the rioters’ cause and the brutality of some of the guards; our sympathies shift teasingly back and forth.

Shot in the Zamora Prison with plenty of authentic extras, it’s tense, gritty, dangerous, threatening, full of twists… and very human. All the things you might hope for in a prison drama, really.

Why is it that when someone writes an autobiography we allow them to reflect glowingly on their contribution to the world, and yet when they write and produce a movie of that very same life it smacks of tacky self-indulgence and bald self-promotion? Harold Morris certainly doesn’t know the answer.

Morris was a racist white man from South Carolina when he was was falsely accused of murder and armed robbery in the late ’60s. Convicted, it seems, on the testimony of the true culprits, he received two life sentences at the Georgia State Penitentiary.

When the prison was directed to racially integrate (the last American prison to do so), its inmates rioted. So the Warden (played here by Stacy Keach) placed Harold (Burgess Jenkins) and his African-American adversary, Marcus ‘Doc’ Odomes (James Black), in a two-man cell to get the ball rolling. Guards laid bets as to who would kill the other first. But first through their mutual love of sport (and participation in the prison’s first integrated basketball team), by getting to know each other and finally, through Harold’s conversion to Christianity and acceptance that he had ‘reaped what (he) had sown’ in his wild youth, the two men develop a deep respect and love for each other.

Then, prior to his parole in 1978 after 9 years inside, Morris is invited to speak to young kids about the dangers of lifestyles involving drugs, alcohol and racism. He discovers his calling and after his release makes a career out of warning children in schools and churches about the perils of mixing with the wrong crowd.

His script about this journey is, however, paper thin. Perhaps the real-life story itself is a bit saccharine, but his sub-plot of the 12-year-old son of the beautiful prison nurse (Morgan Fairchild), whom he coaches in basketball and who in return idolises him (what on earth the kid is doing in the prison in the first place escapes me), comes across as mawkish and self-serving. We see way too much basketball action (even if it were the means by which the prison was able to gain acceptance for its integration program), and way too little of Morris and Doc struggling to overcome their prejudices; all we see is them abusing each other and fighting, then reluctantly sharing basketball glory, then acting like they emerged from the same womb.

The bit players mostly come straight out of central casting - queens, tough guys, comical fat blokes; all except for a gullible, stuttering, kung fu-ing, low-functioning prisoner whom Morris warns about an imminent hit and as a result finds himself the target of the bad boys’ wrath. It’s almost too much when Doc gets stabbed during an attempted hit on Morris and, still in the prison’s rudimentary medical centre, lapses in and out of a coma.

The story is a good one: racist bad boy finds redemption, tolerance and direction in prison. Perhaps someone else should have told it.

There are more films about Attica, it seems, than any other correctional event. This is not the best of them, nor the worst.

It’s pretty much your traditional courtroom drama, based on the prosecution of Bernard Stroble, aka Shango, in the aftermath of the September 1971 riot at Attica which left 39 dead (29 prisoners, 10 guards) and 80 wounded. State troopers put an end to the unrest by firing 2200 rounds (of which Shango wore three) into the mass of prisoners and their guard hostages. Following the riot authorities claimed that the dead guards had had their throats cut by the prisoners; it later transpired that nine, I think, were shot by the troopers. None of the troopers were charged. Shango, seen to be one of the ringleaders, was however charged with slitting the throats of two white prisoners.

Shango (Morris Chestnut) is proud and charismatic. A leader. He is represented by white civil rights lawyer Ernie Goodman (Alan Alda). There is the obligatory lack of trust at the outset, which predictably grows into genuine regard and concern for each other by the end. Goodman is assisted by law student and activist Linda Borus (Rose McGowan), who works as his researcher (and finishes up, outside the film, marrying Shango in 1979 and having a son with him). To add to the drama, the ailing Goodman has a number of worrying wobbly spells - diagnosed mid-trial as Trans-Global Amnesia, a precursor to a stroke - but battles on worthily (ignoring doctors and medication) to add to the worthiness of his fight for a worthy cause.

The prosecution is represented as relying entirely on the evidence of racist investigators and ex-prisoners who have been harassed into making false statements and given inducements to testify. And as relying on dirty tricks, such as having the FBI infiltrate the volunteer Friends of Attica, and cynically discrediting the pathologist who made findings about the deaths that didn’t fit with the State’s script. Perhaps there was also some untainted prosecution evidence, but it may have finished up on the cutting room floor, for artistic reasons.

Anyhow, Shango is acquitted. A self-educated man, he is dignified and vindicated. His mom is proud and relieved. His lawyer is feted. Hooray! Thirty years after the event, Attica would seem to have continued to burn so strongly into the liberal American consciousness that films like this were still needed to assuage the collective guilt. I guess that’s a good thing.

It’s not a prison movie, despite the riot at the heart of it all. We are regularly taken back to the uprising through potent black-and-white flashbacks which do well in conveying some of the drama and the horror. We see virtually nothing of the prison in which Shango still lives, although we do get glimpses of the attitudes of the guards who have to manage him; the memories cut deep on both sides.

As courtroom dramas go, it’s satisfying. As a look at the Attica experience, try Against the Wall (1993) instead.

This remake of The Criminal Code (1931) and precursor to Convicted (1950) is a solid story, well told… notwithstanding that if John Howard’s performance as the young prisoner William Jordan were any more wooden, it would be a tree.

Jordan is 21 when he hits a bloke over the head with a bottle in a nightclub. The other man, who had been pestering Jordan’s floozie, dies. The District Attorney, Tom Mathews (an excellent Walter Connolly) can see that he’s a decent kid, and is sympathetic to him. Privately, he even talks of how he would defend him. Publicly, he offers a plea on manslaughter, which Jordan takes and cops 1 to 10.

Six years on and Mathews misses out on the Governor’s post and instead is made Warden at the penitentiary. The cons don’t like it, many having been sent down by him, and start yammering en masse. Nice welcome. Mathews walks out into the yard, unguarded, and confronts the lot. The yammering subsides.  Mathews is both tough and compassionate.

Jordan, on the other hand, is intense, struggling, and desperately looking for a way out (”if I could just get a breath of fresh air outside… if I could just see a woman’s face…”) when he learns that his mother has died. He almost loses it. Mathews remembers him and throws him a lifeline; he gives him the job of his driver, the major function of which seems to be driving his daughter, Elizabeth (Jean Parker), wherever she needs to go. Jordan falls for her in an awkward, upright, handsome sort of way. Lucky for him that the first woman’s face he saw and fell for wasn’t that of Mathews’ spinsterish sister.

Jordan’s cellmate Finch is planning to do a bunk. He asks Jordan if he wants to be in on it; Jordan declines - he is too much in love. The escape bid goes badly. One of the team rats on the others; Finch is killed and his mate is recaptured. The stoolie, Runch, is given clerical duties around the Warden’s office until he can be safely relocated. Jordan’s other cellmate, Jack Hawkins, who has been working as a butler in the Warden’s house, manages to sneak into the office and kill Runch while both Mathews and Jordan are out of the office.

Mathews returns to find Runch dead. He doesn’t believe Jordan killed him, but demands to know who did. Jordan respects the criminal code, and refuses to say… even though he has parole papers authorising his release in a few days’ time. The whole of the film has been working towards this point; Mathews pulling out everything to get Jordan to give up the name of the murderer, and Jordan having to choose where his loyalties lie and whether he’s prepared to lose his job and do extra years in jail in order to protect a fellow con. The code prevails.

Ultimately his staunchness is rewarded. An unlucky break saw him go to jail; now a lucky break sees him out of it. The other prisoners know that he’s been sent to the dungeon and hasn’t coughed up the name of Runch’s killer; they smuggle a knife in with his bread and water. Hawkins, too, doesn’t want the murder pinned wrongly on his young mate, and engineers his own placement down in the dungeon - where he starts taking guards out with a firearm that materialises out of nowhere. Trapped, he surrenders his gun to Mathews and the Captain of the Yard, Grady, but then takes Grady hostage with the smuggled knife, confesses to the killing of Runch, and is promptly shot dead.

Jordan is exonerated and free to go to parole. Extraordinarily, his feelings for Elizabeth are reciprocated, and even more extraordinarily, her father doesn’t intervene to prevent their union. Oh, happy day!

Some of the interaction between the prisoners in their cell is as good as you’ll see anywhere, and the power of criminal code is brought out in a dramatic, but understated way; there are no histrionics from Jordan - just a quiet but firm resolve not to break the code, even where it is very much against his own interests to do so.