**SPOILERS**** Gangster Johnny Moon,Allan Byron, is seen in the beginning of the movie getting away with murder when he's found innocent by a jury despite all the evidence against him. It turns out that his sister in law Helen Martin played the very married,eight times, Arline Judge who lost her job as a teacher because of her connection to Johnny who later ends up putting an end to his criminal career. By pulling strings Helen get a job as an assistant supervisor at a womens'a correctional lock-up run by one of Johnny's stooges Marcus, Clancy Cooper, who runs the place like a Nazi concentration camp.It's after one of the inmates dies due to not getting any medical help that Helen goes over Marcus's head and reports him to the state governor. This has Helen put on Marcus's sh*t list who's in bed with the corrupt city Mayor McCarthy who is in fact controlled by Johnny Moon. It's when Johhny's girlfriend Rita Randall, Robin Raymond, is sent to the women's reformatory after being arrest for drunk & disorderly, as well as shoplifting, that she 's soon put under the wing of Helen who shows her that being a law abiding citizen is much better then being Johnny's gun-moll. That has Johnny who suspects, and is right, that Rita is going to turn against him and expose his crimes has her released from prison and bumped off by his driver and #1 hit-man Pinkhead played by Sid Melton who has the uncanny ability to remove and put back on his hat in a flash without anybody noticing it!****SPOILERS*** Johnny's luck runs out when he tries to have Pinkhead knock off the drunk as a skunk Lionel Cleeter, Emmett Lynn,who witnessed him killing Rita and was ready, when he sobered up, to go to the police and D.A's office with the damning information. With Cleeter somehow surviving the hit it was all over for Johnny and his partner Pinkhead with the police closing in on them. Helen who in fact started the ball rolling ended up being supervisor of the girls reformatory, after Marcus was put behind bars, and taught the girls there to respect the law as well as themselves which not only turned their lives around but made them able to face the outside world.P.S I noticed that some of the L.A street scenes filmed at night were later inserted as well as colorized in the 1975 Robert Mitchum film noir classic "Fearwell my Lovely".

This is a very low budget film about women who were put behind bars in a young woman's correction facility which is controlled by a mobster named Johnny Moon, (Addison Randall). Johnney Moon controls the city government and has given his right hand hood the position as warden of this correction facility. The girls are treated like they were in a federal prison, with hard work in a laundry and solitary confinement. There is no hope for these women to rehabilitate themselves in order to obtain training for job positions on the outside in order to adjust to society. Helen Martin, (Arlene Judge) has a sister who is married to Johnney Moon and Helen has lost her job because of the bad reputation of her brother-in-law and has been advised to become a social worker at the prison. As soon as Helen walks into the prison, the story becomes interesting.

Those who were looking to this film to be a female I WAS A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG are going to be disappointed. Nary a Bilboe, HandCuff, Pillory, Shackle or Stocks are in sight. No corporal punishment either, though there is a mean laundry and a few cells that were a poor excuse for solitary confinement. Would have expected more from Edgar Ulmer, Atlantis and PRC, after all this is an exploitation film.Starting with Arline Judge and ending with Betty Blythe the cast is full of has-beens and want to be's. Reading their histories is a good lesson on how not to handle your career. They should have all been saving their money when the going was good so they would not have to be doing work like this.One (1) of the other commentators was right regarding the womens hair styles. We kept expecting Condors or Eagles to start nesting in them.

I don't normally post for films I haven't seen, but the comment here from 1999 caught my eye. It mentions that director Edgar G. Ulmer snitched to HUAC. I had never heard this before, nor could I find any confirmation of it. I assume the poster confused Ulmer with one of his contemporaries, Edward Dmytryk, one of the Hollywood Ten who did indeed cooperate with the committee. At any rate, 8 years is long enough for that comment to go unchallenged. I'd hate to think that Ulmer's reputation could be tarnished by this apparent error, especially among viewers of these posts who may have no other knowledge of the man or his career.