Felon

"No rules. No hope. No way out."

Felon is a 2008 drama film about a family man who ends up in state prison after he kills an intruder. Written and directed by Ric Roman Waugh, it stars Stephen Dorff, Val Kilmer, and Harold Perrineau in a story based on events that took place in the 1990s at the notorious California State Prison, Corcoran.

Wade Porter is a loving family man who also owns a business, and a few months away from marrying his girlfriend, Laura; however, one night a burglar enters his home. Wade purses the burglar as he follows him out onto the front lawn and subsequently strikes the burglar across the head with a baseball bat, killing him. The court's district attorney, while sympathetic to Wade's case, is nevertheless compelled by the evidence to reject his plea of self-defense and convict him of manslaughter for three years. Wade's subsequent incarceration forces him into a world unlike any he had known before: first the crowded confines of the county jail where he's attacked by an irritable wannabe gangster, and then the high security unit of the prison called 'the SHU' which involves twenty three hours a day in a concrete box in shackles, listening to hundreds of barked orders and getting no warning shots for annoyance. The only freedoms left to Wade are in his head and in the yard; but, he soon finds out that the yard has been turned into a figurative gladitorial arena for the inmates of The SHU, where prison politics and violence rules. As he struggles to survive inside, Wade discovers two things—the humanity of his cellmate John Smith and the growing sadism of Lieutenant Bill Jackson.

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Felon provides examples of:

• Dirty Cop
• Evil Is Petty
• Karmic Death
• Oh Crap
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge
• Redemption Equals Death