3. There's Always A Brutal Guard And/Or A Corrupt Warden In Prison
Notable Offenders: The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile Of course, The Shawshank Redemption is a great movie, one of the best of all time and one of the highest rated on IMDB. But even that doesn't stop it having that most wonderful of cliches, the guards who are worse than the prisoners. Now prison stories are strange beasts. Our protagonist is almost always wrongly accused and incarcerated. Even if he isn't, it'll be for something we sympathise with. So we are already on the prisoner's side. His other prison buddies will also be the dregs of society, but given enough redeeming qualities that we feel sorry for them. Remember: these are dangerous men that society has deemed necessary to lock up and we have to root for them for this story to work. So the writer will throw everything they can at us in order for us to feel sorry for them. Out come the cute animal sidekicks, out come the horrific back-stories and out come the bullish guards that we can all agree are dicks. There will be the one guard who uses his brute strength needlessly, and there will be the warden who sits by, says nothing and privately enjoys the wild-west laws unfolding in front of him. And we need our guy to beat the system. A system that in the real world locks up the most dangerous men for a reason.