Though it may be in vain, I somehow hope I remember Prison School for something other than the sexual debauchery. Of course, being sexually over the top to the point of discomfort is the selling point of the entire work, with the framework of a prison for five perverted boys in an otherwise all-girls private academy being left as an afterthought, or perhaps a way to reframe the sexuality in terms of the whips and chains the five of them endure day in and day out. And this is a shame, because the show doesn’t simply leave this prison element to the wayside, but rather constructs a rather intricate and thrilling story of the boys’ escape, the machinations of the student council to expel them, and a quest by all of them to find love, fulfillment, and actual sex. The sexual deviancy is larger than life and impossible to ignore, but with all its uncomfortable imagery I’d rather it be the aspect lost to time.
Maybe setting them up in the prison due to peeking on the girls’ bath is excusable in that realm. To set up a harem paradise where the guy to girl ratio is one in two hundred, it’s perhaps only natural to subvert it with them being cast as perverts, the ultimate scum of society and the bane of womanhood. And with prison comes guards, in this case the student council, as sadistic and cruel as any prison guard ever was. Pretty soon the whipping jokes begin, and pretty soon the boys even begin to like it in a sadomasochistic way, sneaking panty shots and nip slips wherever possible. Of course this is aided by the fact that their overseer, the student council vice president, has a pair of breasts that probably weigh as much as the rest of her body each, taking up the entire frame in every shot they appear in without any need for perspective tricks. The other half the time she is the subject of an up-close panty shot, accompanied with enough sweat and juices to keep the whole school hydrated for months. This is the point where the sexuality crosses into uncomfortable, and that’s before the third episode.
What keeps the show worth watching despite the camera itself—so perverted it may as well be a parody on the male gaze—is the actual content of their time in the prison. Kiyoshi and Gakuto plan an escape during a school relay wherein Kiyoshi leaves the school grounds to buy a Three Kingdoms figurine for Gakuto while going on a date with the last girl in the school who still thinks of the boys as good people. They go through hell to break a hole through the prison wall and set up the escape only for it to be shut down with one day left, to which they revise the plan in a way that sets off a whole other chain of misunderstandings and echoes for the rest of the series. The other three harass them for putting them at risk with their escape, but as they get caught in a conspiracy by the student council to get the whole group expelled the group begins to solidify around their mutual failings and desires. It brings them little depth of individual character—indeed each of them could be summed up in three or four words apiece—but their careful planning and attempts to break free once and for all, combined with the constant recurrence of past details and events, elevate their friendship to an admirable level. By the end no one feels like dead weight.
Their counterparts in the student council are overly sexualized and treated differently by the plot based on their gender, but they are also strong, capable, and at times cunning. The president reaps the benefits most of all, constantly in charge of the whole situation and manipulating the boys and girls from the shadows as an unstoppable force. Her father is the ass-crazed school director, and how she handles even him with disgust and a firm hand is a sure signal of her dominance. The vice president has the unfortunate position of being the central overseer with huge breasts as mentioned before, but her physical strength and mental fortitude do cause her to be a constant antagonistic force to the boys. The weakest of the three characters was the secretary, who goes off the rails after ending up in multiple sexually compromising situations with Kiyoshi, constantly trying to impose the shame she feels on him only to end up raising the stakes for her own embarrassment, and in turn her instability. She does almost ruin the boys’ final escape at the end, but it never really feels like her accomplishment, particularly in how Kiyoshi circumvents it and comes out with her first kiss in hand to boot.
From here we can see the three distinct portions of Prison School. First is the prison. It’s hard to talk about the details of the conflict between these two bands of high school students without spoiling the details of their heists and breakouts, but rest assured that there is suitable complexity and intricacy to keep viewers guessing. Despite being high school students in a tiny prison building built in the school courtyard, with little more on the line than expulsion, there is all the real tension of incarceration and freedom, hard labor and escape. Second are the characters, who often seem more incidental to the whole prison setup than an integral part of it, but are appreciable nevertheless. Most are lacking in terms of depth of characterization, but there’s never quite a dull moment with an ant-obsessed hooded man, or a Three Kingdoms nut who speaks in archaic Japanese, or any of the other ridiculous personalities crammed into the school. They’re unrelatable, but they make the story plenty of fun from start to finish. The third aspect of course is the sex, and all I can say is that I hope that memory fades away in time.