Paper 3 Prewrite

For my third paper I want to write about the movie Shawshank Redemption. I love this movie. I think it may be one of the greatest movies every made and there is so much that I could write about. What i really want to focus on is the corruption within the system. I really want to research information about prisons and correctional institutions and learn more about what there like, what they aim to do/their goals and the statistics for people who come out of them. In shawshank, the prison institution is portrayed in such a negative light. They call these places "correctional" institutions but they don't correct like they should. When these prisoners get let out of jail and kill themselves because they can't adjust to normal life-it didn't correct them at all. So I want to look at the corruption within prisons using this movie as evidence. What I just explained about prisoners killing themselves happened to one of the characters in the movie. He was let out after like 50 years in jail and he had his own apartment and got a job working at the grocery store but after a while he was so scared and didn't understand what life was like outside of prison. They kept him so sheltered for so long that he couldn't readjust back to reality and hung himself in his apartment. Then the other example in the movie would be about the Wardon. The wardon uses prisoners as laborers to do work around the jail so that he doesn't have to pay workers. Then he uses Andys accounting skills to his advantage and makes him launder money under a fake person. I also want to look at wrongful incarceration and how insane it is that some people spend their whole lives in jail for a crime they didn't commit. In the movie, Andy is seemingly innocent and when they find the guy who actually did commit the crime, the wardon has the man who was relaying the information killed so that andy would have to stay in jail and continue with scheming money. Theres so much within the movie that can provide evidence towards how these institutions are corrupt and the system needs to be reevaluated so that these prisoners can go to jail and recover from their crimes and not come out worse then they went in.


Discussion: My friend told me that I might need to broaden the topics a little bit so that I would have enough to talk about in 6 pages. She suggested that I go more into research about prisons and jails so that I can compare and contrast what prison is really like with the way that its portrayed in the movie and see if its accurate. She also suggested I re-watch the movie which I definitely want to do so that I can find more concrete examples to back up my thesis.