Criminal Justice and the Media.The Shawshank Redemption

The Shawshank Redemption, a film based on a Stephen King novel­la, tells the story of Andy Defresne (Tim Robbins), a banker false­ly accused of his wife's murder. Sen­tenced to life in a maximum security prison, he is subjected to vicious beat­ings and rapes at the hands of both guards and predatory inmates. Andy learns to adjust with the help of his friend Red (Morgan Freeman), a wily prison veteran. Andy's experience with finance comes in handy when he gives the tough guard captain (Clancy Brown) advice on life insurance and then becomes the crooked warden's financial advisor and accountant. When evidence of Andy's innocence turns up, the warden suppresses it and has a friend of Andy's killed rather than risk losing his trusted inmate advisor.

Andy always has a poster of a beau­tiful actress in his cell (when he first arrives in the 1940s, it's Rita Hayworth), presumably to remind him of what he is missing on the outside. When Andy escapes with the records of the war­den's crooked dealings we find out the true purpose of the poster: it conceals a tunnel he has been digging for twenty years! Andy flees to Mexico, and when Red is released on parole, Andy arranges passage for him so they can be together again.

The Shawshank Redemption is accu­rate when it shows the brutality of a maximum security prison in the 1940s, ruled with an iron fist by a corrupt war­den and brutal guards. This is the subject of another recent film, Murder in the First, in which Kevin Bacon plays an inmate brutalized and killed by guards and wardens at Alcatraz. The era of the "big house" is over today, brought down by the prisoners' rights revolu­tion, which gave inmates access to courts and the ability to sue if subject­ed to such callous behaviour.

The film also shows the victimization of weak inmates by sexual predators, a practice that still goes on today. How­ever, inmates have the right to sue if they are not protected by prison officials, and administrators have taken pains to segregate dangerous inmates from the general population or offer protection to potential victims.

The Shawshank Redemption presents a chilling picture of prison life at midcentury. Although it is fiction, it helps us understand why the federal courts felt it necessary to take control of prisons and empower inmates to seek legal remedies. Without such actions prison brutality might have remained unchecked.