In 1947, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), a banker, was convicted of murdering his wife and her lover, a golf pro. He was sentenced to two life sentences, and sent to the notoriously harsh Shawshank Prison in Maine. Andy always claimed his innocence.

During the first night, the chief guard Byron Hadley (Clancy Brown), savagely beat up a newly arrived inmate because of his crying & complaining. Meanwhile Andy kept to himself even though during the day Ellis Redding (Morgan Freeman), also known as Red, had bet against others that Andy would have been the one to break down first. That beating led to the new inmate's death.

About a month later, Andy approached Red, who was known to run contraband inside the walls of Shawshank. He asked if Red could find him a rock hammer, an instrument he claimed necessary for his hobby in rock collecting. Though other prisoners considered Andy " a really cold fish", Red saw something in Andy, and liked him from the start. Red thought Andy intended to use the hammer to engineer his escape one day but when the tool arrived & seeing how small it was, Red put aside the thought that Andy could ever use it to dig his way out of prison.

Over the first two years of doing time, Andy worked in the prison laundry. He ended up attracting attention from "the Sisters", a group of prisoners who sexually assaulted other prisoners, and was raped on a regular basis.

Red pulled some strings, and got Andy a break by getting him on a work detail tarring the roof of one of the prison's buildings. During the job one day, Andy overheard Hadley complaining about having to pay taxes for an upcoming inheritance. Andy approached, using his expertise as a banker to let Hadley know how he could shelter his money from the IRS. He said he would assist in exchange for some cold beers for his fellow inmates. Warden Norton heard about the help, and used a prison inspection to size him up.

Soon, after asking Red for "Rita Hayworth", he was once more encountered by the Sisters. This time, he resisted, and was brutally beaten, putting him in the infirmary for a month. Boggs, the leader of the Sisters, spent a week in solitary. But when he came out, Hadley and his men were waiting in his cell. They beat him so bad he was left paralyzed, and transferred to a prison hospital, never to bother Andy again. When Andy got out of the infirmary, he found a bunch of rocks and a poster of Rita Hayworth; presents from Red and his buddies.

Andy was sent to work with Brooks Hatlen (James Whitmore), an aging inmate in the prison library, where he set up a make-shift desk to provide services to other guards including the warden with income tax returns and other financial advice. His practice became so appreciated that even guards from other prisons, when they came for inter-prison baseball matches, sought Andy's advice as well.

After 6 years of writing letters, Andy received $200 from the state for the library, along with a collection of old books and r