A spoiled young rich girl is sent to prison for accidentally running down a pedestrian. There she learns about a life and people she had never even imagined existed before.
Mary Turner gets a three years prison sentence for a crime she didn't commit. Once released, she plots to get back at the man responsible for her conviction.
A woman tries to save her husband from the electric chair after both are sent to prison for a murder they didn't commit.
After being convicted of stealing some jewels, Annette Eldrige is sent to a reformatory administered by a sadistic and corrupt female warder. However, one of the board of trustees takes an interest in the new arrival and begins to investigate the management of the institution.
A shoplifter gets sentenced to a women's prison.
Shirley Ross plays an innocent young girl convicted for complicity in a crime committed by her boy friend (Lloyd Nolan). The male crook is sentence to six months on a prison farm populated by both men and women (segregated, of course). Ross is also incarcerated, suffering the cruelties of the sadistic male and female guards (including J. Carroll Naish and future "Ma Kettle" Marjorie Main!)
Suzanne, Renee, Nina and Marta all hate being in prison, being slapped and treated badly, and so all the girls are trying to escape. Madame Appel just causes chaos all the time, with her harsh manners. When Yvonne with her free-thinking ways is put in charge of the school for misbehaving girls, and asks them to tell her their complaints, they don't believe her at first. Yvonne is in love and about to marry the establishment's doctor, and it does not help that one teenage girl falls for him - and is corresponded. It's a hard life for the girls, and for the new female warden.
A reporter and a lawyer investigate a women's prison and help an inmate who does not belong there.
A fired teacher finds work at a girls reform school and helps a detective on a case.
As a woman walks the "last mile" to her execution she remembers back to the incidents that got her framed for murder.
During the Second World War, three downed English airmen hide out with women's internment camp in France.
A women's prison provides the setting for this drama that centers around a naive small-town woman framed by a man whom she met in a nightclub in the big city. She is not welcomed by the inmates and immediately the prisoners are divided.
"Two Women" - Cecilia is in hospital after being subjected to an attempt on her life. Her husband is called to the hospital. Cecilia deliriously mentions a mutual friend. The husband seeks out the friend.
A single mistake puts a 19-year old girl behind bars, where she experiences the terrors and torments of women in prison.
The critical establishment was clearly not prepared to accept a woman's prison film featuring former prostitutes recovering from venereal diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and estranged lovers. With its cat fights, hysterical tantrums, film noir lighting, and dramatic music, White Beast is indicative of the new influences of the Hollywood psychological thriller on Naruse. Caged (John Cromwell, 1950) initiated a cycle of women's prison movies in the United States that may or may not have been shown in Japan, but the stylistics of White Beast draw on the same paranoid woman's films and film noir conventions that preceded the American cycle.
Jean Raymond an upper class woman with a gambling addiction, is given a twelve-month prison sentence resulting from her inability to pay her debts. At first she is overwhelmingly depressed by life in the women's prison; gradually, however, her misery is relieved by the many close friends she makes there. This sympathetic drama traces the contrasting lives and often faltering progress of the inmates of a women's prison.
A crusading psychiatrist battles a sadistic female warden to improve conditions at a women's prison.
Love-starved gun molls (Carole Mathews, Beverly Michaels) escape from a prison farm where matrons make their lives miserable.
In love with a man who wants to marry her after he returns from a trip to sea, chorus girl Angela Booth tries to quit her seamy job and become a model citizen. When her employer refuses to dissolve her contract, though, they quarrel and she accidentally hits him. He presses charges, claiming she hit him deliberately, and she is convicted and sent to prison. As her fiance is at sea and out of contact, she is terrified he will think she has jilted him when she does not keep a New Year's date. A kindly old convict, Gran', notorious as a prison-breaker, agrees to engineer an escape for Angela...
Locked in her cell, a murderer reflects on the events that have led her to death row.