What really happened during the Attica Prison Rebellion

In 1971, a warden at Attica Penitentiary is caught up in a hostage crisis when inmates take over the prison to demand better living conditions.

Employing methods of direct cinema–observation, limited stylization, and non-intervention–this stark look into the State Prison for the Criminally Insane in Bridgewater, Massachusetts shows its denizens, who were often kept in barren cells and infrequently bathed, forced to strip naked publicly, force feeding, and the indifference and bullying by many of the hospital's staff.

A prisoner leads his counterparts in a protest for better living conditions which turns violent and ugly.

Follows the largest prison uprising in US history, conducting dozens of new interviews with inmates, journalists, and other witnesses.

An in-depth look at the prison system in the United States and how it reveals the nation's history of racial inequality.

South Africa, 1978. Tim Jenkin and Stephen Lee, two white political activists from the African National Congress imprisoned by the apartheid regime, put a plan in motion to escape from the infamous Pretoria Prison.

After killing a prison guard, convict Robert Stroud faces life imprisonment in solitary confinement. Driven nearly mad by loneliness and despair, Stroud's life gains new meaning when he happens upon a helpless baby sparrow in the exercise yard and nurses it back to health. Despite having only a third grade education, Stroud goes on to become a renowned ornithologist and achieves a greater sense of freedom and purpose behind bars than most people find in the outside world.

Timeworn Joe Collins and his fellow inmates live under the heavy thumb of the sadistic, power-tripping guard Captain Munsey. Only Collins' dreams of escape keep him going, but how can he possibly bust out of Munsey's chains?

Escaped convict Sam Gillen single-handedly takes on ruthless developers who are determined to evict a widow with two young children.

When petty criminal Luke Jackson is sentenced to two years in a Florida prison farm, he doesn't play by the rules of either the sadistic warden or the yard's resident heavy, Dragline, who ends up admiring the new guy's unbreakable will. Luke's bravado, even in the face of repeated stints in the prison's dreaded solitary confinement cell, "the box," make him a rebel hero to his fellow convicts and a thorn in the side of the prison officers.

The new warden of a small prison farm in Arkansas tries to clean it up of corruption after initially posing as an inmate.

The story of Bobby Sands, the IRA member who led the 1981 hunger strike during The Troubles in which Irish Republican prisoners tried to win political status.