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Left alone momentarily to work in the warden's office, prisoner Andy Dufresne (played by Tim Robbins in the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption), plots a surprise treat for his fellow inmates. He activates the warden's PA system, flips on a record player, and spreads the sweet sound of opera music throughout the jail. Initially frozen with shock, the prison guards rush toward the office to silence Dufresne's act of defiance. After they finally break through the locked door, the infuriated warden sentences Dufresne to two weeks of solitary confinement. Dufresne later boasts to his inmate friends that the time alone wasn't too hard: He listened to Mozart in his head. "That's the beauty of music," he explains. "They can't get that from you."

The Shawshank Redemption, based on a short story by Stephen King, expresses the spiritual longing for freedom. In this instance, music represents Dufresne's struggle to retain hope amid a corrupt prison culture. The movie borrows freely from a rich genre of prison narratives, which Christian writers have pioneered and bolstered for centuries. For some of Christianity's most powerful teachers, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and John Bunyan, internment has been God's agent for redemption and a stirring source of literary inspiration.

The Russian czar's guards dispatched Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Siberia-bound sled on Christmas Eve, 1849. Earlier that year, he had been arrested for participating in a socialist discussion group, whose members desired to end serfdom in Russia. After awaiting their fate for more than eight months in a Saint Petersburg jail, they learned the bad news: They had been sentenced to death.

But on December 22, at the last possible moment, a guard rode in with the urgent news of their reprieve. The execution had been staged-one last measure of psychological torture before the czar doomed them to years of hard labor in Siberia.

As the sled made its way toward Siberia, Dostoyevsky was moved by the compassion of peasant women who trailed behind the prisoners. One of the women offered him a copy of the New Testament—the only book he was allowed to read in the labor camp. Thus far in his adult life, he hadn't had much use for Christian faith. His first novel, Poor Folk, had earned him high praise as Russia's next great author, but his growing love for humanity suffered from the socialist shortcoming he would later critique in The Brothers Karamazov: "The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular."

This paradox crippled most political prisoners in the labor camps. Thrown together with petty thieves and hardened killers, intellectual dissidents often struggled to adapt to the merciless system imposed by their captors and aggravated by their fellow captives. Not long after he finally returned home in 1859, Dostoyevsky published a fictionalized account of his time in Siberia. But Memoirs from the House of the Dead briefly got him in trouble once more with the government. The czar's censors deemed his novel's depiction of Russian prisons to be too favorable. Given the novel's content, it's hard to imagine what would have appeased the government. House of the Dead ponders the prisoners' pathetic attempts to exercise freedom despite restraints and repercussions. Even normal convicts who toiled in obscurity sometimes exploded in drunken, murderous frenzies.

To avoid succumbing to this destructive jail culture, Dostoyevsky drew strength from two unlikely sources. First, despite never spending a moment alone during his four years of incarceration, he grew to love and sympathize with his fellow inmates. In his youth, Dostoyevsky had been a champion of moral causes and had trusted in the human capacity to overcome problems like serfdom. But in prison he encountered men far removed from any pretense of moral capability, and he observed how the cruel prison system only trampled them further. He wrote of his surprising compassion for these rough characters, "It thrills the heart to realize that the most downtrodden man, the lowest of the low, is also a human being and is called your brother."

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