Critical Theory

My own personal opinion is that prison life, as portrayed in moving image, is both realistic and exaggerated at the same time.
While things such as rape in prison & abuse of the prisoners by those in power may be stereotypically expected, from my research I have gathered that this genuinely happens.

Alcatraz prison, one of the most well-known prisons, has been portrayed many times in films such as Escape from Alcatraz & Murder in the First, which was loosely based on a true story. Alcatraz is portrayed as an extremely high-security prison that nobody had ever escaped from, but the website alcatrazcruises.com states that Alcatraz has been misrepresented - "Alcatraz was a tough prison but it was a fair one; most former convicts will grudgingly admit the island was safer and better run than many other prisons where they spent time." The website also states that "Hollywood produced many movies that over-dramatized Alcatraz, especially in the 1930s & 1940s, often depicting brutal guards and violent episodes that had no basis in reality."

However, the website may be biased towards Alcatraz & wanting to portray it in a positive light as it is a cruise company that goes to the site.

ALCATRAZ CRUISES.COM/WEBSITE/FAQS-ALCATRAZ-HISTORY.ASPX

*How long should this be?

Primary Research; a question I posted on the internet

I posted the question 'What is your opinion of The Shawshank Redemption & or Scum?'
I also asked 'Why/why did you not like the films?' & 'What were the films positives and negatives?' as I wanted more than a one-line answer.
I posted this question in a note on my Facebook profile & tagged as many people as I could that I knew had watched at least one of the films so I could get as big a response as possible. I also tagged all the people I know that study/have studied Media so I could get a more detailed response, for example: "This mise-en-scene in Scum is very important to the story, I feel. There is no musical score at all in the film, unlike nearly every other film I have seen, adding to the dreary, depressing feel of Borstal."

Out of the twenty-three people that replied, only four of them had seen Scum, whereas all of them had seen The Shawshank Redemption. I do not feel it is a coincidence that the film with the Hollywood cast & huge budget has been seen by far more people than the relatively unknown Scum, which was nearly banned.

It was the general consensus that The Shawshank Redemption is an "amazing" film for three reasons:
- the message of hope it conveys
- the strong bond forged between the two main characters; some noted that they liked it more because one of the leads is black, in a film set in the 1954's (perhaps not realising that the character of Red was meant to be a white, Irish man)
- the fact that the principal antagonists of the film are "dealt with accordingly, showing good can overcome evil"

The four people that had seen Scum felt that it had some things in common with The Shawshank Redemption, such as the abuse of the prisoners by the Wardens, and the male rape of those seen as "weak & vulnerable".
However, they also felt there were some clear differences between the two films. One of the people I asked the question to said, "There is no message of hope at all in Scum. The prisoners aren't even rehabiliated, they're just left to do what they want, which is probably why there are so many realistic fight scenes in this film. When I first watched the film a few years ago, I genuinely felt like the rape scene in Scum could have been real. The rape scene in The Shawshank Redemption is fairly realistic I suppose, but the fact that the rape in Scum is witnessed, yet nothing is done about it, shows just how corrupt it must be in a prison environment, and that this sort of behaviour must really go on."