Do I not get it or something?

It just felt like an individualist white middle class mans fantasy of how he'd totally outgrind and outsmart the prison system by doing epic taxes and being a good person

just befriend the prison guards!

play beautiful cultured classical music to these poor barbarous inmates as an act of # la resistance

then, totally own the corrupt system by exposing them to newspapers... the police and judicial system are otherwise perfect so the prison commissioner will kill himself rather than face the HARSH HARSH CONSEQUENCES that one could receive in America for money laundering... notwithstanding that the money laundering is chump change in comparison to the slave wage labour that the inmates are made to perform...

Morgan Freeman speaks in hope platitudes for the entire movie

Is this movie not just about how all you need to do is grin and grind to escape your hellish life?

Then people jerk it off for 'showing the humanity of prisoners for the first time EVER in cinema and not treating prison rape as a joke' - surely you can only find such a thing to be true if you have only ever seen about 5 movies in your life? Or is that just a pure indictment of the Hollywood system - that it only ever makes garbage visible?

Am I being cynical? Was I just in a bad mood?

Utterly cheesy and without charm.