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When we evoke the prison movie as a genre, most of us recall images of tough men, butch women and their helpless, puny victims in the washroom. Prisons are where social outcasts hatch remarkably intelligent and daring escapes and where frustrated wardens exemplify the injustices of power hierarchies. Prisons are low culture, high function institutions. In a prison, life is bleak.

Doing Time is a wonderfully gentle subversion of the despairing prison movie. How gentle? Replacing the starkness of the … (read more)