Studio: Metro/Cal Vista
Director: DCypher
Cast: Justine Joli, Brittney Skye, Hailey, Nina Hartley, Violet Blue

Prisoner is told in flashbacks, through letters written over several years by Charlene (Brittney Skye) in a braless womens' prison, to her daughter, Chloe.

Abuse of eclectic substances, long the backbone of the adult industry, is captured on film from the opening scenes, in which Skye smokes a bong and is tied off by a cigarette-smoking boyfriend by a coffee table littered with fast food and alcohol. Of low-life boyfriend Victor (Steven St. Croix), Skye writes, "I could tell he had something that I needed," as she blows him for a toot of sweet booger sugar.

"All this girl does is lie," DCypher (no one knows how to spell his name) told me at the fabulous eight-night press junket Metro sponsored for the film. "We see what she's actually doing but what she's writing to her daughter is completely different."

The number one adjective for Charlene is sordid. She even snorts coke from a one dollar bill. Showing her steely single mom grit, however, she manages to get it all done with her eyelashes intact.

After she and Victor kill her husband for drug money, Charlene ends up in a minimum-security prison. They let her keep her porn nails and rings, and allow Justine Joli to continue coloring her hair.

Our nation's womens' prisons would be a lot less horrific if the heavies looked more like Nina Hartley and less like Evan Seinfeld. Hartley surprises Joli in the shower and shows her some hard female justice. Joli doesn't protest. "Has someone claimed your sweet hole, Cupcake?" Hartley asks.

*shudder*

"This could be your daughter, this could be your daughter," I kept saying to Hartley, rocking back and forth and not fast-forwarding.

Being a guard at Hot Womens' Prison is also something worth checking into. Guard Barrett Blade takes an interest in Charlene and guard Tommy Gunn services Charlene's cellmate Rosa (Hailey Paige) on a table full of just-folded laundry. Rosa explains to Charlene that affairs with guards make life on the inside a lot easier.

Charlene receives a letter from Chloe's foster parents, explaining that they think it's best Chloe not see or hear from her mother after witnessing her father's death.

"We couldn't very easily put a child in the room of a murder scene in a porn film," DCypher told me, "So Chloe isn't shown until she's an adult."

We do see Chloe (the other Violet Blue) in the end, when mom screws things up again by trying to escape and taking down Barrett Blade in the process. Charlene has been sentenced to death by lethal injection (DCypher is the priest who reads last rites) and not even an ass-loving governor will give her clemency. Chloe, finally allowed access to her mother's letters, has hooked up with an older man (Randy Spears), who looks a bit like Victor.

The cycle continues.

Issues with the movie? Justine Joli is tasty and all, but she's not the star of the show. Prisoner's boxcover should depict a taut prison laundry scene, not a Joli glamour shot. And I am writing this from prison - none of the screws wear, much let us wear, all the jewelry these inmates are carting around.