Best Prison Guard Movies & TV Shows

A psychiatrist is sent to evaluate if a convicted multiple murderer who's awaiting execution on Death Row for eighth year now and whose behavior during that time got more and more erratic is still mentally fit to be executed.

Framed in the 1940s for the double murder of his wife and her lover, upstanding banker Andy Dufresne begins a new life at the Shawshank prison, where he puts his accounting skills to work for an amoral warden. During his long stretch in prison, Dufresne comes to be admired by the other inmates -- including an older prisoner named Red -- for his integrity and unquenchable sense of hope.

A supernatural tale set on death row in a Southern prison, where gentle giant John Coffey possesses the mysterious power to heal people's ailments. When the cell block's head guard, Paul Edgecomb, recognizes Coffey's miraculous gift, he tries desperately to help stave off the condemned man's execution.

Based on the true life experiences of poet Jimmy Santiago Baca, the film focuses on half-brothers Paco and Cruz, and their bi-racial cousin Miklo. It opens in 1972, as the three are members of an East L.A. gang known as the "Vatos Locos", and the story focuses on how a violent crime and the influence of narcotics alter their lives. Miklo is incarcerated and sent to San Quentin, where he makes a "home" for himself. Cruz becomes an exceptional artist, but a heroin addiction overcomes him with tragic results. Paco becomes a cop and an enemy to his "carnal", Miklo.

A dying man frames himself for murder so his widow can collect the reward.

Due to a political conspiracy, an innocent man is sent to death row and his only hope is his brother, who makes it his mission to deliberately get himself sent to the same prison in order to break the both of them out, from the inside out.

In a small Michigan town where the business of incarceration is the only thriving industry, the McClusky family are the power brokers between the police, criminals, inmates, prison guards and politicians in a city completely dependent on prisons and the prisoners they contain.

The Nazis, exasperated at the number of escapes from their prison camps by a relatively small number of Allied prisoners, relocate them to a high-security 'escape-proof' camp to sit out the remainder of the war. Undaunted, the prisoners plan one of the most ambitious escape attempts of World War II. Based on a true story.

Bad Girls is a British television drama series that was broadcast on ITV from 1 June 1999 to 20 December 2006 and starred Simone Lahbib, Mandana Jones, Debra Stephenson, Linda Henry, Jack Ellis and many more throughout the eight-year run. The series was broadcast in 17 countries and was produced by Shed Productions, the company which later produced Footballers' Wives and Waterloo Road. It is set in the fictional women's prison of Larkhall, and features a mixture of serious and light storylines focusing on the prisoners and staff of G Wing. From 2010, the UK broadcast rights were bought by CBS Drama, and is repeated regularly – as of September 2012, the channel is re-running the series again in a late-night time slot.

Observing programs for troubled teens in which inmates reveal the realities of prison life in the hope of deterring them from a life of crime.

Guilt, violence and impossible choices – what does it take to survive? Tense, gritty and heartbreaking – Jimmy McGovern's award-winning prison drama, with an all-star cast.

San Francisco Bay, January 18, 1960. Frank Lee Morris is transferred to Alcatraz, a maximum security prison located on a rocky island. Although no one has ever managed to escape from there, Frank and other inmates begin to carefully prepare an escape plan.

Tasked with extracting a family who is at the mercy of a Georgian gangster, Tyler Rake infiltrates one of the world's deadliest prisons in order to save them. But when the extraction gets hot, and the gangster dies in the heat of battle, his equally ruthless brother tracks down Rake and his team to Vienna, in order to get revenge.

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 stranger-than-fiction account of a prison break in upstate New York in the summer of 2015, which spawned a massive manhunt for two convicted murderers who were aided in their escape by a married female prison employee with whom they both became sexually entangled.

An eccentric warden and his staff run a bizarre maximum security prison full of dangerous prisoners.

Walen plays Dan Sparling, a convicted embezzler who becomes editor of his prison newspaper. After serving out his sentence, he sets up an independent newspaper devoted to attacking corruption in public life, encountering various difficulties due to his being an ex-con and opposition from the incumbent administration.

When he unwittingly sends some of his men into a trap, pirate Captain Peter Blood decides to rescue them. They've been taken prisoner by the Spanish Marquis de Riconete who is now using them as slave labor harvesting pearls from the sea.

A charming thief and a band of unlikely adventurers undertake an epic heist to retrieve a lost relic, but things go dangerously awry when they run afoul of the wrong people.

When a trio of ex-convicts led by Mattie Appleyard is released from prison, they hope to open a general store using money Mattie has saved during his 40-year sentence. This attempt is met with great resistance from a corrupt prison official and the banker who issued Mattie the check.

Heavyweight Champ George "Iceman" Chambers is sent to a Russian jail on trumped-up drug charges. In order to win his freedom he must fight against the jailhouse fighting champ Uri Boyka in a battle to the death. This time he is not fighting for a title, he is fighting for his life!

Timeworn Joe Collins and his fellow inmates live under the heavy thumb of the sadistic, power-tripping guard Captain Munsey. Only Collins' dreams of escape keep him going, but how can he possibly bust out of Munsey's chains?

Professor James Murray begins work compiling words for the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in the mid 19th century, and receives over 10,000 entries from a patient at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, Dr. William Minor.

A single mistake puts a 19-year old girl behind bars, where she experiences the terrors and torments of women in prison.

Forced to work under slave-like conditions in a "prison for profit" program, the inmates of a mostly-African-American female prison, Whitehead Correctional, try to take over the institution. At the core of the story is Frances, who finds herself in prison after being falsely convicted of murder, and who is told that her baby has been murdered, sparking her to lead her fellow inmates in the protest

Ethan Hunt and his team are racing against time to track down a dangerous terrorist named Hendricks, who has gained access to Russian nuclear launch codes and is planning a strike on the United States. An attempt to stop him ends in an explosion causing severe destruction to the Kremlin and the IMF to be implicated in the bombing, forcing the President to disavow them. No longer being aided by the government, Ethan and his team chase Hendricks around the globe, although they might still be too late to stop a disaster.

19-year-old Eric, arrogant and ultra-violent, is prematurely transferred to the same adult prison facility as his estranged father. As his explosive temper quickly finds him enemies in both prison authorities and fellow inmates — and his already volatile relationship with his father is pushed past breaking point — Eric is approached by a volunteer psychotherapist, who runs an anger management group for prisoners. Torn between gang politics, prison corruption, and a glimmer of something better, Eric finds himself in a fight for his own life, unsure if his own father is there to protect him or join in punishing him.

The new warden of a small prison farm in Arkansas tries to clean it up of corruption after initially posing as an inmate.

An elite Navy SEAL uncovers an international conspiracy while seeking justice for the murder of his pregnant wife.

Given a pardon from jail, Roy Earle gets back into the swing of things as he robs a swanky resort.

An escaped criminal impersonates a Police Commissioner, causing no end of trouble to a determined Federal Agent.

On the day of his scheduled execution, a convicted serial killer gets a psychiatric evaluation during which he claims he is a demon, and further claims that before their time is over, the psychiatrist will commit three murders of his own.

Few wartime prisoners have attempted escape quite as many times as bumbling RAF Officer James Forrester. Though Officer Forrester has twenty-three escape attempts to his name, each successive attempt he makes to break free somehow seems to go worse than the last. But this time there's a difference, because Officer Forrester isn't just plotting his own escape, but the escape of all 327 of his fellow prisoners as well - and all at once. In fact even the Germans want to escape!

Larry Poole, in prison on a false charge, promises an inmate that when he gets out he will look up and help out a family. The family turns out to be a young girl, Patsy Smith, and her elderly grandfather who need lots of help. This delays Larry from following his dream and going to Venice and becoming a gondolier. Instead, he becomes a street singer and, while singing in the street, meets a pretty welfare worker, Susan Sprague. She takes a dim view of Patsy's welfare under the guardianship of Larry and her grandfather and starts proceedings to have Patsy placed in an orphanage.

This complex portrait of modern-day life on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation explores the bond between a brother and his younger sister, who find themselves on separate paths to rediscovering the meaning of home.

Lyle and Eric Menendez were nice, educated boys from Beverly Hills, which makes the murder of their parents even more inexplicable. Never-before-seen details emerge in this investigation into their lives.

A young man who was sentenced to 7 years in prison for robbing a post office ends up spending 30 years in solitary confinement. During this time, his own personality is supplanted by his alter ego, Charles Bronson.

Debbie Ocean, a criminal mastermind, gathers a crew of female thieves to pull off the heist of the century at New York's annual Met Gala.

Defiant young activists take the women's suffrage movement by storm, putting their lives at risk to help American women win the right to vote.

After working as a drug courier and getting into a brutal shootout with police, a former boxer finds himself at the mercy of his enemies as they force him to instigate violent acts that turn the prison he resides in into a battleground.

While participating in a rehabilitation program training wild mustangs, a convict at first struggles to connect with the horses and his fellow inmates, but he learns to confront his violent past as he soothes an especially feisty horse.

A prisoner leads his counterparts in a protest for better living conditions which turns violent and ugly.

The daring convict no. 23, known as The Eel, escapes from prison and, after mocking his inept persecutors, saves the lives of three people in peril: a beautiful girl, her mother and an annoying suitor, only to get exhausted and almost drowned. Once he regains his strength at Judge Brown's home, he participates on an upper-class social party where he competes with the suitor for the favors of the charming Miss Brown. But prison guards are still after him…

A hardened crook behind bars comes up against a reform-minded warden.

A young man who is charged with child molestation is placed in New York City’s infamous Tombs prison. When the other inmates in his cell block find out what he is charged with, life becomes extremely difficult for him.

Unshackle your laughing gas, put your ball and chain away, take a prison break and get ready to escape with the Daltons! The fab four are back! The Daltons will try every trick in the books to get out and then some: a maze of tunnels, explosives, hot air balloons and rain dances, and a whole cast of zany characters to help them get free ... or not! The only thing they don’t try using are their brains! But what they lack in intelligence, they sure make up for in willpower and imagination! The far west has never been crazier!

The Rizzos, a family who doesn't share their habits, aspirations, and careers with one another, find their delicate web of lies disturbed by the arrival of a young ex-con brought home by Vince, the patriarch of the family, who is a corrections officer in real life, and a hopeful actor in private.

With three days before his paper folds, a crusading editor tries to expose a vicious gangster.

Old West highwayman Bill Miner, known to Pinkertons as "The Gentleman Bandit," is released in 1901 after 33 years in prison, a genial and charming old man. Entering a world unfamiliar to him, he returns to the only thing that gives him purpose — robbery.

A chronicle of Nelson Mandela's life journey from his childhood in a rural village through to his inauguration as the first democratically elected president of South Africa.