Jacktown (1962)

Forty years ago, older men would strike up conversations with me. I'd talk to them. I thought I was being kind to a lonely old person. They'd casually ask how old I was. Once they knew I was over seventeen, they'd start hitting on me. Those guys knew what they were doing.

Jacktown is about Frankie, an aging delinquent, 21-years-old, from a petit-bourgeois family in Detroit. After a quick shot of his birth, the movie opens with him clubbing a man over the head and robbing him. So you don't feel too bad later when he goes to prison for molesting a fifteen-year-old girl he just assumed was older than she was.

"Will you meet me later?" he asked the girl (Alice Gordon) who was working as a carhop at a drive-in.

"Yeah."

"Are you kidding me?"

"No, I'm serious."

She WAS serious. Grimly serious. No enthusiasm whatsoever.

The wretch is sentenced to two-and-a-half to six years in "Jacktown", Michigan's sprawling prison, then the largest in the world according to the narrator 

IMDb says the movie was 62 minutes. The version I saw on Pub-D-Hub was 57 minutes.

The documentary realism was undercut by the warden sympathizing with the sex offender to the point that he doesn't report him for escaping, stealing a car with a child in the back seat and showing up at the warden's daughter's apartment.

Patty McCormack got top billing as the warden's daughter.

Anti-statutory rape prisoners crowd Frankie.