THEY BROACH AN INTERESTING SUBJECT during the final leg of 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption. That’s what we need to talk about here. First, though, a quick run-through of the movie:

The Shawshank Redemption is a prison movie that starts in 1947 and ends in 1966.¹ It stars Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne, a cold and outwardly impersonal (but ultimately likable) banker who is wrongly imprisoned for the murder of his wife and her lover. Alongside him is Red (played by Morgan Freeman), best friend to Andy and also a resourceful veteran prisoner who oversees the group of prisoners that Andy eventually becomes friends with. There’s Bob Gunton as Samuel Norton, the villainous warden of the prison who, after finding out that Andy is a banking whiz, forces Andy to launder money for him. And there’s Clancy Brown as Byron Hadley, captain of the prison guards and Warden Norton’s main muscle. There are others in the movie, but that’s the main group.

After Andy has served nineteen years of his double life sentence, Andy and Red and their group befriend a new prisoner and career criminal named Tommy Williams. Through a wild coincidence, we find out that Tommy served time in a separate facility with the man who actually killed Andy’s wife and lover. When Andy tries to talk to Warden Norton about it, Warden Norton disregards the story. When Andy assures him that if he ever got out of prison he would never say anything to anyone about the money laundering that Warden Norton is engaging in, Warden Norton becomes incensed. He sends Andy to solitary confinement for a month, then arranges for Captain Hadley to murder Tommy. When Warden Norton visits Andy at the end of his first month in solitary, Andy tells him that he’s not going to launder money for him anymore. Warden Norton responds by sentencing Andy to another month in solitary to see if he’ll change his mind. At the end of the second month, Andy decides he’ll go back to laundering money for him. And shortly after that is the aforementioned broaching of the aforementioned interesting subject.

Andy and Red are sitting in the yard talking after Andy’s gotten out of solitary. Andy asks Red if he thinks he’ll ever get out of prison. Red says yes, that he’ll probably get released when he’s too old for his freedom to be useful anymore. Andy says that, were he given the choice, he’d live in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, “a warm place with no memory,” which is a wonderful description. Then he says, “Open up a little hotel right on the beach. Buy some worthless old boat, fix it up new. Take my guests out charter fishing.”

Red, who has been in prison for forty years by that point, says that he’s been institutionalized; that he’s spent most of his life in prison; that seeing something as big as the Pacific Ocean might scare him to death.

Andy shakes his head a little, then, while staring off into space, says, “Not me. I didn’t shoot my wife and I didn’t shoot her lover. Whatever mistakes I’ve made I’ve paid for ’em and then some. That hotel, that boat—I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”

That evening, Andy escapes from Shawshank State Prison.² And the next morning, pretending to be Randall Stephens, a make-believe person he created to set up bank accounts to funnel all the warden’s laundered money through, he walks into a handful of banks and withdraws several hundred thousand dollars. Red, narrating the scene, says, “Mr. Stephens visited nearly a dozen banks in the Portland area that morning. All told, he blew town with better than $370,000 of Warden Norton’s money. Severance pay for nineteen years.”

And so there’s the question: Was Andy Dufresne’s time in prison worth it?

This is not related at all to The Shawshank Redemption, but let me tell you: In the next chapter, there’s a list that goes over a bunch of the lessons that Robert De Niro has taught people in movies. Because of that, I had Arturo draw a picture of De Niro inserted into the scene from Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams stands up on the desks in front of the kids as he teaches them. We ended up not having enough room for it in the chapter, so we put it in here. Looking at it makes me happy. I hope you like it as much as I do.

Some stats for you:

• Andy escaped from prison in 1966.

• Adjusting for inflation, that means the $370,000 that he stole back then would be worth nearly $2.9 million in 2018, which is the number that I’m going to use going forward since we live in this general time and not fifty or so years in the past.³

• Andy was in prison for nineteen years.

• An easy mistake to make here is to say that that means he was, in effect and on average, paid about $152,630 per year to be in prison.

• The thing of it is, though, since Andy actually had all of the money that he withdrew, that means he didn’t gross $152,630 per year (which is how salaries are typically advertised), he netted $152,630 per year.

• And, assuming (a) he was filing his taxes in Maine (which is where he was living); (b) he was filing them as a single person (because he was single when he was in prison); and (c) he was paying the standard things people have to pay within their paychecks (federal taxes, FICA, Medicare, etc.), that means his salary was likely something closer to $250,000.⁴