THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF PRISON LIFE IN THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION AND THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT

Prison Literature is a widening area of study in Literature. The works mainly talk about prison, jail, or any confinement. This paper explores the concept of prison, and how it confines and resists the mind and body of an individual. The paper uses a comparative study to analyse ‘Shawshank Redemption’, a prison movie, and ‘Stanford Prison Experiment’, a real-life prison study using Prison Literature as the theoretical framework. The researcher aims to explore how the prison institutionalizes the prisoners internally and externally, how the characters resist or conform to the confinement, and the prison culture, power dynamics, and punitive nature. The main focus, of this paper, is on how people react to confinement.