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Christopher R. Whittle

Professor John Gallagher

ENG 102: English Composition and Literature II

April 6, 2011

The Real Deal at Shawshank and its Replacement

The Stephen King novella “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption”, the first story

in the book Different Seasons, takes place at a maximum security prison in Maine, an eerie one

for that matter. People might think that because King is world renown for his horror stories,

prison life at Shawshank State Prison would be too good to imagine, thinking that something

toward this degree would be purely Hollywood, for which Warner Bros. Pictures received an

Academy Award for best picture back in 1994 under the abbreviated title Shawshank

Redemption (Kymchuk). Others would consider the work of King as pure entertainment for

extreme mature readers, since the subject matter is very graphically sensitive to some. But

regardless of what a person’s immediate reaction when they hear or read the phrase “Stephen

King”, one should reflect on answering these questions carefully and thoughtfully:

Do you have a criminal record? Have you ever been arrested before? Have you ever spent

some time in the county jail during the course of your lifetime? Do you possess experience

forgetting to appoint a designated driver to transport you from the big birthday party, getting

arrested on the very same Saturday night, spending the rest of the weekend in the slammer

waiting to be arraigned in district court? Did you forget to check under the seats and in the trunk

for marijuana or cocaine, and then get pulled over by a state trooper for a bad inspection sticker?

Did the trooper ask “is your license okay?” Did you answer “Yes”, and upon a scan of your

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license he finds out you have a warrant for stealing a candy bar from 7-Eleven, so he arrested

you? Upon searching the vehicle, did he see pot or coke in the trunk?

Where you in Massachusetts at the time of the crime, where you were eventually

sentenced to Walpole State Prison? Or were you in Maine, where you thought you were not

going to get caught for an out-of-state inspection sticker? Do you believe that the most secure jail

in Maine was mere fantasy and not actual American History?

Well, that is not the case. While there is no municipality called Shawshank, Maine

(AAA), there once was the Shawshank State Prison, not only in fiction but in reality as well. The

original Shawshank existed from 1824 until February 2002 on a harbor at Thomaston, Maine,

closing as the third oldest maximum security prison at the time. The replacement prison, now

located in Warren, Maine, opened shortly thereafter at the sum of seventy-six million dollars

(Corrections Digest). The facility holds consistently approximately nine hundred prisoners at any

given time (Maine).

In the novella Red, one of the main characters who was sentenced to Shawshank for a

triple murder (King 15), was paroled in 1977 and obtained employment at a FoodWay grocery

store with assistance from the parole board (King 104-5). Andy Dufrense, the vice president of

the Portland Bank and Trust Company and double-murderer of his wife and a golf professional

from Reno, Nevada instructing her (King 19), who escaped from prison on the evening of March

11-12, 1975 (King 84), prepared “the tax returns for… the screws at Shawshank” (King 51) and

made rock sculptures:

Andy continued to shape and polish the rocks he found in the exercise yard…Nonetheless, he found enough to keep him occupied, I guess…. Andy would give his stones and his rock sculptures away from time to time in order to make room for new ones. He gave me [Red] the greatest number, I think – counting the stones that looked the matched cufflinks, I had five (King 72).

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Tommy Williams, a robber from Massachusetts who was arrested in Rhode Island, was

transferred to a minimum security prison in Cashman, where he was employed as a potato picker

to offset incarceration costs, and attended the Cashman Vocational Institute (CVI) to learn a

trade for when he is released from prison (King 70). When the license plate factory needed some

renovations, seventy prisoners volunteered to participate in the construction (King 40).

These occupations may be commonplace in prisons throughout the world to combat

boredom among the prisoners, but the Maine Department of Correction in real life has vocational

opportunities for them, versus being one of the “many prisons in which there were practically no

constructive activities to keep inmates busy” (Roberts 10). Operating since 1934, the Prison

Industries Program, which is the state locale of the Federal Prison Industries (FDI), allows

inmates to “profit” on skilled labor while they are serving their sentences, with the funds being

paid to “the state for their ‘room and board’ expenses, any crime restitution, and child support”.

The showrooms where the furniture the inmates craft are sold number sixty across Maine, with

the flagship Maine State Prison Showroom, located near the original Shawshank State Prison on

Route 1 in Thomaston (Maine). With to that Regard, John W. Roberts states that:

Stable work programs gave impetus to other program initiatives. Vocational training programs, for example, went hand-in-hand with work programs. Revenues generated by state-use manufacturing could be earmarked for education, recreation, or other forms of inmate programming (11).

Whereas, the inmates like Red, Andy, and Tommy are able to receive the benefit of vocational

and educational training to prepare for life after prison, play chess, or watch a movie at the

correctional facility while “selling” their goods to the general public. The verb “selling” is in

quotation marks because the prisoners themselves do not personally sell the products, just like

manufacturers generally do not sell the products they personally assemble.

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While a prisoner is laboring in the field, he does not receive any health or life insurance,

and does receive a just wage due to his punishment. Just like the People’s Republic of China:

Prisons create new markets for law enforcement technology, provide cheap labor for corporations, add to the census of depopulated rural counties, disenfranchise poor and minority people, and lower official unemployment statistics (Rhodes 10).

As one can imagine, the prison population does not receive the minimum wage that a free

civilian would receive as required by law, and again, creates a product that is not created by the

hard-working civilians in a trade union or guild for a just wage that supports an all American

family. Rather, the labor is performed by people who are at the same class as a communist or

third-world, developing nation, where irregularities are the name of the game. At that point, there

is no set amount of money that can be considered to be a living wage, and prisoners are stealing

positions from morally behaved citizens that deserve them.

The new Warren State Prison also provides mental health and rehabilitation services for

those inmates who need it, especially those transferred from Shawshank who really should have

been sentenced to a residential program. Paul Davis, a former Maine state trooper, later the

Maine Senate Minority (Republican) Leader, questions the increase of adult male incarcerations

in the Maine prison system: “I wonder if it is a good policy to have so many people incarcerated,

especially nonviolent prisoners” (Rosenbloom). Is it really a superb idea to have people locked-

up with the keys thrown away for every little offense, making them wear black and white prison

stripes on a long-term basis? (Herman).

Little is described of the location or physical area where Shawshank was situated by

Stephen King, but the Academy Award winning motion picture, released under the title

Shawshank Redemption by Warner Bros. Pictures, depicts the prison as a spooky place (see

picture). The movie scenes were actually shot at a closed, historic facility, the Ohio State

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Reformatory, in Mansfield, Ohio.

Locally known as Mansfield State

Prison, this ancient Germantic castle

was built from 1886-1910 by

Cleveland architect Levi T. Schofield.

Despite being known as a “Germantic

castle”, the architecture is actually

Romanesque revival. The prison

closed in 1990, and is now a museum,

with tours being conducted by the

Mansfield Reformatory Preservation Society. Additional scenes of the prison were videographed

at the Mansfield Warehousing and Distribution Center in Mansfield, Ohio, the Stephan Lumber

Company and Myers Laundry, both in Upper Sandusky, Ohio (Kymchuk).

Based on some striking literary and cinematic observations, Patricia Cook states that

“most people also know that Hollywood takes liberties with stories, for dramatic or comedic

effect, time, or other considerations” (1). With that saying, stories are changed all the time, for

which could vary for cultural reasons where the production is released. One example could be

the release into an Arab country featuring the Islamic custom of mens’ head coverings. Another

example might be that it could take four hours to read a one hundred page short story, but have

no patience viewing the silver screen for every word, word-for-word, in the novella for four

hours. Looking at text is plain the majority of the time, and if you do not have a clue what the

words stand for, it might be time to have a dictionary handy. On the opposite, looking up every

single word in a given passage in the dictionary (whether online or print) is very time

The Ohio State Reformatory, Mansfield Ohio

Courtesy of Shawshank Remdemption.com

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consuming, and is not acceptable for high school and college students, who should know several

words, provided they are familiar with the genre or theme of the text.

People back in the glory days of Shawshank could have been incarcerated at Shawshank

if they committed very serious crimes. People believe that Shawshank was just a place that King

made up, but it was his inspiration (Corrections Digest). The prison life from yesterday and

today make take place in a new setting, but life in prison is the same wherever you are jailed.

Life is tough if you are innocent. It is really rough if you are guilty and a habitual offender. Life

in prison is no fun, and no one wants to be there. Reading a book or watching a movie may seem

like fun and games, but if you are an inmate, property of the state correctional system, it is no

comedy whatsoever, since you have no freedom. Every time a person goes to prison, he costs

you, the taxpayer, thousands of dollars per year for one person. State budgets across the country

have trouble being balanced, and it is not funny when somebody sins and has to be locked away

for a long period of time. Yet again, people misbehave, and they are sent to prison for the

smallest of offenses and cannot get a job due to the fact they have a criminal record. To make

matters worse, “prisons have become a substitute for traditional industries, offering middle-class,

union-protected wages to rural people facing globalization and diminishing employment

opportunities” (Rhodes 9).

Some will say that they will (change their) plea to “guilty” so they will get away with

shorter jail sentence, knowing (or thinking) that prison life will not be that of in the Warner Bros.

film. Well, that is not always the case. Prison life is extremely treacherous, especially at a

maximum security facility. If someone is misbehaving in prison, they are placed into solitary

confinement or isolation, which no person imaginatively would appreciate.

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If you are being held waiting to stand trial, good luck, because it is very difficult to

escape in real life in the chaotic world that all people reside today. Andy Dufrense may have

escaped from prison and was a fugitive never found, but in real life, fugitives like you will in all

probability be found and surrender to more criminal charges to an already thick file folder. Yes

indeed, fugitives do escape prison today and are never captured, but it unlikely that you will

escape today because a Department of Homeland Security was established by the United States

Government as a reaction toward the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and keeping innocent

citizens safe and secure.

Therefore, the moral of the story is not to fanaticize and to live up to one’s moral

expectations. Good behavior results in rewards, such as a high-paying career, salary, a newly-

minted automobile, a flat screen plasma high definition television, and a profitable parcel of real

estate. Bad behavior results in debts, which include, but not limited to, credit card debt,

alcoholism, tobaccoism, narcotics, poisons, and all other vices that lead up to traffic violation

notices and arrests, which consequent into jail time and probation, where the latter you cannot

leave the county where you committed the crime you were convicted of.

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Works Cited

AAA. Interstate Road Atlas. Williamston: Universal Map, 2003: 26. Print.

Cook, Patricia. “Shawshank Redemption: Book vs. Movie: What’s Different between the Original Story and the Movie?” Associated Content. 2011. Accessed 3/24/2011. HTML.

Herman, Peter G. (ed.) “Editor’s Introduction”, The American Prison System. New York: H.W. Wilson Co., 2001: 3. Print.

King, Stephen. “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”, Different Seasons. New York: Signet, 1983: 15-107. Print.

Kymchuck, Joel. Shawshank Prison.com. 2010; Accessed 2/28/2011. HTML.

“Maine: ‘Shawshank’ Prison ends 178-year history”, Corrections Digest. 2/15/2002. Accessed 2/28/2011 on All Business.com. HTML.

Maine, State of. “Maine State Prison”, Department of Corrections: Industries. Augusta: 2005. Accessed 2/28/2011. HTML.

Rhodes, Lorna A. Total Confinment: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004: 9-10. Print.

“Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption”, Bookrags. 2011; Accessed 3/28/2011. HTML.

Roberts, John W. “A Century’s Legacy: Five Critical Developments in the Evolution of American Prisons, 1900-2000”, Corrections Today. 8/2000; reprinted in The American Prison System, ed. Peter G. Herman. New York: H.W. Wilson Co., 2001: 5-16. Print.

Rosenbloom, Joseph. “The Shawshank Succession”, Prospect. 12/1/2003. Accessed 2/28/2011. HTML.