Prison Stories: Women on the Inside

A woman goes behind bars in order to save her father's life.

Sugar State Women’s Prison. An Everglades hellhole where innocent girls are forced to slave in the swamps by day then turn tricks for the warden by night. A prison camp where corruption, brutality, and sexual abuse are all part of the daily routine. But when reporter Valerie March goes undercover inside Sugar State, that’s when the powder keg really explodes! Follow Valerie through prison life - catfights, knife fights, rape, whippings, prostitution, and the “hot box” - before she and her fellow inmates take bloody, unforgettable revenge on their captors. Inspired by the great women-in-prison films of the past, SUGAR BOXX takes everything one step further. SUGAR BOXX has it all.

A constant runaway is given over to the care of the state and finds herself in a remand centre for girls. She is soon caught between the uncaring bureaucracy, the sometimes brutal treatment from her peers and her own abusive family, and only one care worker sees her potential to rise above her tragic circumstances.

Eight women miners get fed up with their lifestyle and decide to try crime. After successfully pulling off a jewelry store robbery, they are busted by narcs when they try to buy cocaine. The eight get sent to a prison where a butch head guard uses the prisoners for her own deviant pleasures. Two of the women manage to escape and then get mixed up with a shah who had a scarab ring stolen in their jewelry heist.

An unfortunate and naive girl is set-up by her boyfriend and convicted of drug smuggling. She is sent to a women's correctional facility where she must constantly struggle to survive.

Somewhere in the middle of the English countryside a former judge and a group of former prison warders, including his lover, run their own prison for young women who have not been held properly to account for their crimes. Here they mete out their own form of justice and ensure that the girls never return to their old ways.

Jesus Franco's campy women's prison film is worthwhile for genre devotees primarily due to an outstanding cast. Mercedes McCambridge is unintentionally hilarious as sadistic lesbian warden Thelma Diaz, spitting tacky dialogue with exuberant venom in a performance so overbearing that it verges on classic. The plot is standard for the genre, as three women (Maria Rohm, Elisa Montes, Luciana Paluzzi) are sentenced to an island prison off the Panamanian coast, only to encounter torture, rape, and lesbianism. When sympathetic Warden Caroll (Maria Schell) replaces Diaz, the prisoners assume that conditions will improve, but their agony only worsens until they decide to escape. Rosalba Neri co-stars, and Herbert Lom runs the corrupt men's prison nearby. 99 Mujeres was heavily censored in various prints, with versions running anywhere between 70 and 108 minutes. Edits running 84, 86, and 94 minutes are most commonly available.

When the door of freedom cracks open for inmate Maggie Blair at her brother's funeral, she doesn't let anything stand in her way. This begins her furious determination to unearth the gang that murdered her brother.

A young couple move into an expensive new apartment after the husband gets a big pay raise. Unfortunately, he is soon stricken with a mysterious ailment and becomes bedridden. The wife, unable to find a job and with bills piling up, runs into a seedy pimp who suggests a way she may be able to make a lot of money in a short time.

Behind prison walls, corruption, sex and power make criminals out of the guards and heroes out of the guarded. For more than a decade, the lawless guards inside a maximum security women's prison have reigned with impunity - rape, sex for money and illegal favors have become the norm until one woman decides to battle the system. Leading a group of inmates on a risky life-or-death struggle for justice, a ten year silence is finally broken, exposing the twisted truth to the world and enabling the prisoners the freedom to live without fear.

When call girl Cindy gets busted under the new 36 Strikes Law she receives the maximum sentence. Desperate to beat the rap Cindy agrees to become a Special Agent for the Feds and infiltrates an illegal Female Fight Club.

Lynn Schaffer is willfully irresponsible once too often, gets fired and refuses a plea-bargain with her employer. She's now convicted and because of this uncooperative attitude gets the maximum sentence, 10 years in a women's jail wing. Model husband Larry, who wasn't informed of her dumb schemes is left running her appeal, the household and spoiled daughter who now feels abandoned. Since most inmates are junkies or prostitutes, sergeant Ed Crang and fellow corrupt jailers can run a 'favors in kind exchange'. For rebels, it gets worse. Larry however has his own radio show, so it all hangs on gathering proof.

In 2000, a California State Prison inmate serving Life Without Parole (LWOP) approached the warden to request a dedicated yard for men serving life sentences that would break the code of violence dominating prison life. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) subsequently transformed Yard A at California State Prison into The Progressive Programming Facility, which inmates call The Honor Yard. The only one of its kind in the United States, this experimental prison yard is free of violence, racial tensions, gang activity and illegal drug and alcohol use.

A parole officer goes undercover to investigate prison brutality but is trapped when the only person on the outside who knows why she's there is killed.

A pretty young college student is arrested during a demonstration. She is taken to a notorious detention center, where she is subjected to sexual harassment by lesbian inmates and guards, and becomes the target of a sadistic, bullwhip-wielding warden.

The tale of three mothers of first graders whose apparently perfect lives unravel to the point of murder.

A dramatic thriller that explores the demons lurking beneath the surface of a contemporary American family. The Rayburns are hard-working pillars of their Florida Keys community. But when the black sheep son comes home for the 45th anniversary of his parents' hotel, he threatens to expose the Rayburns' dark secrets and shameful past, pushing his siblings to the limits of family loyalty.

A security consultant hunts for a ruthless assassin. Equally obsessed with each other, they go head to head in an epic game of cat-and-mouse.

A crime she committed in her youthful past sends Piper Chapman to a women's prison, where she trades her comfortable New York life for one of unexpected camaraderie and conflict in an eccentric group of fellow inmates.

A new caretaker moves with his family into the mysterious Overlook Hotel for the winter.

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

The daily lives of prisoners in Emerald City, an experimental unit of the Oswald Maximum Security Prison where ingroups - Muslims, Latinos, Italians, Aryans - stick close to their mutual friends and terrorize their mutual enemies.

The story of an American Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent going undercover to stop an organization from trafficking people, and the struggles of three trafficked women.

At the end of the 1950s, in a more innocent America, the brutal, meaningless slaying of a Midwestern family horrified the nation. This film is based on Truman Capote's hauntingly detailed, psychologically penetrating nonfiction novel. While in prison, Dick Hickock, 20, hears a cell-mate's story about $10,000 in cash kept in a home safe by a prosperous rancher. When he's paroled, Dick persuades ex-con Perry Smith, also 20, to join him in going after the stash. On a November night in 1959, Dick and Perry break into the Holcomb, Kansas, house of Herb Clutter. Enraged at finding no safe, they wake the sleeping family and brutally kill them all. The bodies are found by two friends who come by before Sunday church. The murders shock the small Great Plains town, where doors are routinely left unlocked. Detective Alvin Dewey of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation heads the case, but there are no clues, no apparent motive and no suspects...

Crime journalist Raphael Rowe goes behind the bars of some of the world’s most notorious and toughest prisons. Immersing himself in maximum security facilities around the world to live as a prisoner, he encounters the inmates locked up for their crimes and meets the men and women on the right side of law tasked with keeping the criminals behind bars.

A dramatic thriller about a broken lawyer who seeks redemption through his investigation into the suspicious suicide of a teenage ballet prodigy.

The black sheep of the Argyll family, Jack Argyll, was accused of murdering their matriarch a year ago, but now a man shows up on their doorstep claiming Jack’s innocence. The family must come to terms with this news and the fact that the real killer might still be among them.

The parallel lives of identical twin brothers Dominick and Thomas Birdsey in an epic story of betrayal, sacrifice and forgiveness set against the backdrop of 20th century America.

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.

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.