The Shaw Shank Redemption is a movie about time, patience and loyalty. It is about how two men serving life sentences in prison become friends and find a way to fight off despair.
             The film itself reflects the slow passage of the decades. "When they put you in that cell," Red says, "when those bars slam home, that's when you know it's for real. Old life blown away in the blink of an eye. Nothing left but all the time in the world to think about it."
             The story is narrated by "Red" Redding, who has been inside Shaw Shank prison form many years. One day he and his fellow inmates watch the latest busload of prisoners unload, and they make bets on who will cry during their first night in prison, and who will not. Red bets on a guy named Andy, who looks like a "babe in the woods."
             But Andy does not cry, and Red loses the cigarettes he wagered. Andy turns out to be a surprise to everyone in Shaw Shank, because within he holds a powerful quality of determination and strength that nothing seems to be able to break. Andy was a banker on the outside, and he's in for murder. He's apparently innocent, and there are all sorts of details involving his case, but after a while they take on a kind of unreality; all that counts inside prison is its own society.
             Red is also a lifer. From time to time, , he goes up in front of the parole board, and they measure the length of his term (20 years, 30 years) and ask him if he thinks he has been rehabilitated. Oh, most surely, yes, he replies; but the fire goes out of his assurances as the years march past, and there is the sense that he has been institutionalized (prisonization)- that, like another old lifer, Brooks, who kills himself after being paroled, he can no longer really envision life on the outside. With Red, there's an underlying problem. Behind bars, Red is king. He's the prison fixer, able to get you a pack of cigarettes, a little rock pick or a post
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