Prison action with Barbara Stanwyck (center) as a
rebellious inmate in Ladies They Talk About.

Although used primarily to illustrate injustice, the hard and fast prison rules serve to emphasise the penal system's unyielding process. This is expressed through seemingly trivial regulations, such as the rule in The Ladies They Talk About (1933) that no inmate may touch the prison radio; the rules forbidding talk among prisoners during hard labor in Road Gang (1936), Papillon (1973), and Scum (1983); the rules that inmates must refer to each other only by their prison names in Wedlock (1990); and so on. Breach of such regulations is often punished by long periods of solitary confinement, a penalty often represented as harsh given the original offense (Papillon (1973) and Murder In The First (1995), for example).

Some films carried political messages about the injustices suffered by inmates. This was particularly true of films made in the 1930s with prison represented as a symbol of "the system" -- the cause of the despair and recession in America of the 1930s. Films such as Hell's Highway (1932) and Blackwell's Island (1939) show prison as "the ultimate metaphor of social entrapment" (Roffman & Purdy 1981, p.26) with an emphasis on how the brutality of prisons and chain gangs robs men of their individuality:

"The evil in the men's prisons appears to have been transformed into some larger entity. More often than not, that larger entity takes the form of a political or big city 'machine.' The effect of this was to encourage the audience to ... vent whatever animosity they might be able to muster on ... the 'system' that seemed, to the thirties audience, to control the very life of every honest, hard working (or unemployed) man in America." (Querry 1976, p.159)