I'm in the middle....

What pissed me off in this movie was that either the diner owner lied or didn't testify that Allen was forced to rob at the point of a gun. He ran from the scene in panic!

And prison should rehabilitate and build character, not destroy, unless their crime is of a physically violent or sexual nature. Beans, grits, corn mush, and greens are adequate. Not pork fat and a piece of dough made out of lard and flour!

Ladysoul, your comments make much sense to me. My biggest beef would be with your next to last sentence—“of course people didn’t care if blacks were treated badly.” Then and now, many, many people who aren’t black would indeed care about blacks being treated badly. Had you simply stated it differently, such as, “Now many people upset about treatment of a white man would not care too much if the film only depicted bad treatment of blacks…” I would say you are correct. It is the generalization in the way you worded it that I dispute. To prove my contention, I should like to cite all the people before the Civil War who were outraged about treatment of slaves, based on reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

I fully agree that prison life is not supposed to be easy and that convicts should be forced to spend much of their day engaged in some sort of productive work, rather than sitting around doing little. I haven’t read factual descriptions of these types of prisons, but it seems likely that, while some places may have had sadistic guards/wardens who truly mistreated prisoners, including in some of the ways depicted in this film, I believe most were not nearly as brutal as this film shows. The film’s purpose was, partly, to advocate for a big change in the way prisons worked, largely to get rid of chain gangs altogether. With that purpose, it would serve the producers’ purposes to exaggerate the conditions, much as Uncle Tom’s Cabin exaggerated the conditions under which slaves lived. Now I am in no way defending slavery, simply stating that this famous novel was not an accurate depiction of the way most slaves were treated.

I also agree that they shown our hero totally innocent of the robbery charge that got him into trouble, unlike the real-life person on whom the story was based, because people would have dismissed much of what happened because “he brought it on himself” had he been shown as actively engaged in the robbery.

Taking this simply as a dramatic movie, it is a powerful film. I don’t think some sort of chain gang is necessarily the best way for prisons to function, but I do believe prisoners should be kept busy working at something. They should not be brutalized by guards and they should be properly fed—that doesn’t mean fancy food, but nutritious enough to not be malnourished.

Perhaps the most difficult challenge in trying to run a prison system is trying to detect which are the prisoners who truly can be rehabilitated and which ones really are not about to change no matter what we do to punish or educate them.