Best movies like Prison Stories: Women on the Inside

An adaptation of Bishop T.D. Jakes' self-help novel, chronciling a woman's struggle to come to terms with her legacy of abuse, addiction and poverty.

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

Jenny is sent to a women's reform school. It is run by evil warden Sutter and her henchwoman Edna. Jenny will stop at nothing to escape but she also has to deal with Charlie the bully.

British documentarian Nick Broomfield creates a follow-up piece to his 1992 documentary of the serial killer Aileen Wuornos, a highway prostitute who was convicted of killing six men in Florida between 1989 and 1990. Interviewing an increasingly mentally unstable Wuornos, Broomfield captures the distorted mind of a murderer whom the state of Florida deems of sound mind -- and therefore fit to execute. Throughout the film, Broomfield includes footage of his testimony at Wuornos' trial.

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

A young woman is convicted on drug offenses and sent to a women's penitentiary run by a repressed and oppressive female warden. When the prison's sadistic doctor begins conducting illegal "therapeutic" experiments on the inmates, the ladies plot their revenge.

In the future, the inmates of a private underground prison are computer-controlled with cameras, dream readers, and devices that can cause pain or death. John and his illegally pregnant wife Karen are locked inside "The Fortress" but are determined to escape before the birth of their baby.

Female prisoners in a Phillippine jail are being subjected to sadistic torture. Five of the women--along with the help of two men--plot an escape.

Idealistic and naive Dr. Jason arrives at a school for delinquent girls and immediately begins to try to make a difference in the lives of some of the inmates. Oblivious to the sadistic treatment of the girls by the matrons, it takes a rebellious girl named Loretta to open his eyes. Assisted by a female staff member, Jason finally gets proof of the abuse and threatens the head of the school with exposure unless he is given full rein to run things.

Six female prisoners are given a weekend furlough to prepare them for their upcoming parole. While out, they all have miscellaneous sexual experiences, some good, some bad. One returns to her pimp even though he beats her, one overcomes her frigidity, one gets gang raped, two join in a threesome, and one goes back to her criminal lover shortly before the police show up.

Sam Connor kidnaps his young daughters, April and May, sells them to strangers, and accidentally kills his wife when she attempts to intervene. Sixteen years later, April is an out of control outlaw who has come into a life of drugs and crime, while May has grown into a straight laced, refined woman. The plot thickens when April avenges her mother's death by killing her father, and May is sent to jail as the prime suspect. Fortunately, Detective Arman, instantly taken with May, fights for her innocence and tries to get her out before she is taken down by other hostile prisoners.

Carrie, Mitzie, and Chicago get in trouble a lot in the women's prison, but are offered early parolement if they agree to become subjects of a study on human aggression and antisocial behavior at a Kansas City college. Dr. Blalock, the professor in charge of the study, is accepting money under the table from a shady government contact to use an experimental drug on the women. The drug induces the same hostile behavior the doctor is supposedly trying to cure, and after a while the women have a hard time conducting themselves in a civil manner.

Underworld drug king Toplar is flooding the market with low-grade heroin. Agent 99 gets a bit too close to the truth, but manages to gasp out a clue as to the identity of Toplar: he has a scar. Jane (Agent 73) is called in to find Toplar, and gets a camera implanted in her breast in order to photograph the bad guys she dispatches so headquarters will be able to identify Toplar when she finds him. Meanwhile she begins falling in love with fellow agent Jim.

Clive Owen stars as a prison inmate who goes into an experimental "open" prison where the inmates walk around freely and get job training for their impending releases. While there, he discovers he has a talent for growing flowers. His talent is recognized by a gardening guru who encourages him and four other inmates to enter a national gardening competition

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.

Kate and Sharon kill a man in self defense and are framed by the justice system. They are put in prison and forced into prostitution. With the help of their defense attorney, they devise a plan to bust out of prison and hopefully expose the group of corrupt politicians, judges, lawyers, etc. who put them there in the first place.

In a slightly future America, a woman goes to the big city to visit with her sister, who is dead in her apartment. In order to find out what happened to her sister, she gets a job working at a dance club, a lower notch in the strip joint circuit. Some of her colleagues begin showing up dead as she uncovers a sinister hierarchy in the strip club management that is harnessing the sexual activity for their own twisted ends.

A young man gets in over his head when he convinces a small-town girl he's a secret agent.

After years of treatment at a mental institution for the criminally insane, serial killer Norman Bates is finally released. Deciding to move back into his long-dead mother's infamous old house, he soon finds himself tormented by 'her' demands and begins to question his own sanity.

Various stories of how crack cocaine has infiltrated the inner-city streets. Based on Buddy Giovinazzo's novel "Life is Hot in Cracktown".

A new inmate at a juvenile reformatory tries to organize a mass breakout.

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.

The film is a semi-biographical story based on the experiences of former prison guard Ronnie Thompson who spent seven years working in some of the UK's most dangerous prisons. Based on Thompson's book of the same name, the project stars James D'Arcy (Master & Commander), Noel Clarke (Kidulthood), Frank Harper (The Football Factory), Jamie Foreman (Layer Cake), Andrew Shim (This Is England) and Kate Magowan (Stardust). The story revolves around former soldier Sam Norwood who takes a job as a prison officer when he returns from Iraq and becomes exposed to the underworld of prison culture - including corrupt guards and drug trafficking.

After spending a decade in prison, Annie returns to her hometown, and tries to reconnect with her now-adolescent daughter Sophie.

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 unlucky woman’s mother is murdered by a scarf-wielding killer named Silk, leaving the woman injured, traumatised and suffering from amnesia. She’s committed to a mental institution, where Silk follows her, looking for the papers he was trying to get from her mother. And Silk’s only the beginning of her problems, since the asylum is run by a mad doctor, performing experiments in chemical lobotomies!

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.

Two beautiful young women on vacation looking for fun. Two dirty cops looking for easy prey. One human auction where the rich, dominant and powerful bid for slaves to satisfy all sexual desires including lesbian submission. They have been located, framed and convinced to confess to a crime they did not commit or face a lifetime in a prison of women...now their innocence will be sold to the highest bidder.

A young millionaire is obsessed by a woman he keeps dreaming about but doesn't know. After an investigation, he discovers that she is a large-breasted stripper who spends a lot of time in a nudist camp. He decides to follow her there.

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.

Documentary look at the 1996-97 effort of the dancers and support staff at a San Francisco peep show, The Lusty Lady, to unionize. Angered by arbitrary and race-based wage policies, customers' surreptitious video cameras, and no paid sick days or holidays, the dancers get help from the Service Employees International local and enter protracted bargaining with the union-busting law firm that management hires. We see the women work, sort out their demands, and go through the difficulties of bargaining. The narrator is Julia Query, a dancer and stand-up comedian who is reluctant to tell her mother, a physician who works with prostitutes, that she strips.

It's the year 3000 AD. The world's most dangerous women are banished to a remote asteroid 45 million light years from earth. Kira Murphy doesn't belong; wrongfully accused of a crime she did not commit, she's thrown in this interplanetary prison and left to her own defenses. But Kira's a fighter, and soon she finds herself in the middle of a female gang war; where everyone wants a piece of the action... and a piece of her! "Caged Heat 3000" takes the Women-in-Prison genre to a whole new level... and a whole new galaxy!

A woman from a "cursed" family is released from a mental facility, and soon dismembered corpses start turning up.

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.

Following a long investigation, Police Detective-Lieutenant Anthony "Tony" Roberts becomes convinced that there is some powerful unknown-master-mind leader behind the gangs of crooks who are terrorizing the city, and it has something to do with paroled convicts. He sets up a scheme with his supervisor to have himself shamed by being demoted to a patrolman and then caught in the act of receiving bribe-money from a racketeer. He is convicted and sent to prison, and the manner in which his parole is arranged leads him, dangerously, to the secret-head of the gang.

A man gets out of prison after 15 years for stabbing his wife to death, and his social worker becomes convinced he was innocent. As she researches his case, and interviews other people who were involved, she begins to fall in love with him, as her friends warn her that he's dangerous.

An innocent, pregnant prison inmate (Shirley Knight) becomes the bad warden's (Andrew Duggan) personal favorite.

A man struggles to piece together his life after suffering years of abuse in a children's home - a personal battle made doubly difficult by crusading reporters determined to expose the scandal.

Tells the parallel stories of nine-year-old Carlitos and his mother, Rosario. In the hopes of providing a better life for her son, Rosario works illegally in the U.S. while her mother cares for Carlitos back in Mexico.

A young girl is framed for a crime she didn't commit and sent to the state penitentiary, which is run by a crooked warden and a corrupt staff. A reporter manages to get herself sent to the prison so she can expose the brutal conditions and prove the girl's innocence.

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.

A fired teacher finds work at a girls reform school and helps a detective on a case.

The new female warden of a high-security prison faces challenges when an inmate puts up a bounty to anyone who can break him out of jail.

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.