Inmate Roles In The Shawshank Redemption

Shawshank Redemption was a spectacular movie that was about a man named Andy Dufresne. Andy was convicted of murdering his wife and his wife’s lover, he was sentenced to two life terms in the Shawshank Prison. Andy is innocent and finds interesting way to deal with his life in prison until he manages to escape. While in Shawshank, Andy makes a lifetime friend, Red, who will be by his side throughout all of his hardships. Andy and his friends put forth the characteristic of prison subcultures, along with the characteristic of inmate roles. The Shawshank Prison is also seen as a total institution that can institutionalize some of its long time offenders. Right from the start of Shawshank Redemption one can see that most of the inmates portrayed …show more content…
Sykes points out 15 different inmate roles from “The Right Guy” to “The Square John”. In Shawshank Redemption, there are three man that could hold inmate roles up to their standards. The first being Andy, at the beginning of the movie Andy is “The Fish” which like any new incoming inmate that does not yet know the rules of the prison. Andy then turns into “The Innocent”, right from the beginning Andy always claims his innocence. The other inmates blow it off because everyone is innocent. Later to find out that Andy is actually innocent; he never killed his wife or her lover. After sometime in the prison, Andy then turns into “The Center Man”, Andy trying to be as nice and helpful as possible when it comes to the warden and guards. He tryings to do this because this good behavior is rewarding. He gets some small favors like the warden letting him keep the large poster of the sexy Rita, but it also allows for larger ones like him having better jobs and getting to work closer with the warden and the guards. Another character is Red, who is the merchant or peddler. Red can get anything any inmates what in prison. He is the lead dealer of the underground black market. He supplies good to everyone that can pay the price of them. Red can also been seen as “The Right Guy”, he has fully participated in the inmate codes as long as he has been in prison. He knows the way the prison works and follows it accordingly. …show more content…
Which most prisoner facing extremely long sentences from a young and many of them being beating until they were broken in order to learn all the rules it was hard of them to cope with modern life after they were released. There were two examples of completely institutionalized inmates given. Inmate Brooks was released after 50 years of being in prison. Brooks only knew how the prison worked; in prison he was highly intelligent and very useful where in the outside world he was nothing, which can be severely hard to cope with. When Brooks left the prison the first thing he notices is that almost everyone has a vehicle, when he was last outside there were only a handful of people that had vehicles. The prison set him up in a halfway house and found him a job that was not suitable from him. This just made Brooks more depressed and he tried to find way back into prison. Brooks decides he could not handle this life and more and hangs himself. When Red finds himself accepted for parole, he finds that he is having the same problems that Brooks was having. He was having a hard time trying to adjust to the outside world. When Red is at his job, he keeps asking his boss if he could use the bathroom. His boss then pulls him aside and tells him he does not need to ask to take a piss, Red reflects on this in the bathroom and realized that for the past 40 years he had to ask and