The Movie The Green Mile

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Recommended: Stressors unique to corrections officers

The Green Mile

For this assignment I decided to watch/write about the movie The Green Mile. To sum up the movie it starts off as the story of Paul's (Tom Hanks) life as a death row corrections officer during the Great Depression, at the Cold Mountain Penitentiary. One day, John Coffey, a giant black man who was convicted of raping and killing two young white girl. He arrives on death row. John comes off as shy and soft-spoken, from this point I couldn’t imagine that he committed this crime. John reveals powers by healing Paul's urinary tract infection and give live back to a mouse. Percy Wetmore, has recently begun working in the death row inmate’s block; his fellow guards dislike him. Before the final scene of the execution John takes Paul’s hand to show him what really happened to the two little girls. As an elderly Paul finishes his story, he notes that he requested a transfer to a youth detention center, where he spent the remainder of his career. Transitioning this movie into what we have learned in class, I decided to talk about how correctional officers acted in the movie and comparing it to what we have learned in class. I will mention how stress among inmates and staff were shown, personnel matters, and staff vs inmates not relating to stress.
Though there were many things that could have been compared to what we had spoken about in class, I decided to focus on correctional staff. I learned from watching this movie that it showed the difference in some of the correctional staff’s behavior and the issues that come into play with the inmates and each other. In the beginning I realized their security is much more different than how ours is, they mainly showed where the “high security” inmates stayed and the three main offic...

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...he execution of John they all were touched by it. This actually made most of them move to a different facility. It is awful watching an innocent man and such a great one also being executed for a crime that no one gave him a chance to explain. While watching the movie I would want them to see how the security levels are/were. It seemed to be that the high max inmates were segregated in a different wing than the rest of the inmates. They were brought in chained, single, and through a truck looking vehicle. The other lower level inmates were able to go out and work and seemed to be walking around the prison yard. Lastly I would like for them to pick up on male inmates and how they differ from the female inmates. We did not see female inmates but seeing how they treat the male inmates and the kind’s behavior difference between the two if they are not the same already.

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