STIR CRAZY: Prisons on screen

The documentary series Prison (9pm, Ch4) goes behind the gates of HMP Durham. Here’s our selection of the most memorable and notorious fictional prisons on film and TV…

Norman Stanley Fletcher and Lennie Godber shared a cell at HMP Slade in sitcom Porridge (1974-77). Ronnie Barker played lovable rogue Fletch, tormenting officer Mr Mackay (Fulton Mackay, centre right, with Barker).

Shawshank was the location for cinema’s most uplifting prison escape, in 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption, with Tim Robbins (left). The New England prison was the creation of Stephen King, and features in many of his books.

Oswald State Correctional Facility was the setting for US TV series Oz (1997-2003), about an experimental unit nicknamed ‘Emerald City’.

Based on Joliet Correctional Center was in the Illinois, location Fox River State Penitentiary for the first series of Prison Break (2005). Wentworth Miller starred as the new inmate with a very well thought out escape plan.

Although it was a psychiatric hospital, not a prison, Gotham City’s Arkham Asylum housed such supervillains as the Joker and Penguin, and in Batman Begins (2005), even the people who worked there – namely Cillian Murphy’s Jonathan Crane (aka Scarecrow) – had a screw loose. And in the Harry Potter films, Azkaban was a magical island fortress, an ungodly place from which, for centuries, no one escaped.