Michael Scofield isn't like other prisoners. He doesn't want to get out of jail, he wants to get in. So he stages a botched armed robbery to ensure that he's put behind bars in five's new imported US drama series, Prison Break.

He aims to make contact in Chicago's maximum security prison Fox River Penitentiary with his imprisoned brother Lincoln, awaiting execution on death row for murdering the Vice President's brother. He believes Lincoln is innocent and that going to jail will help him uncover the shadowy conspiracy responsible for framing him.

His introduction to Fox River is a violent one, as he witnesses an inmate being stabbed. "Welcome to Prisneyland," chuckles his cellmate.

Prison Break debuted in the States to record-breaking ratings, evidence that viewers like nothing more than an inside story.

The new boys on the cell block include Stacy Keach as Warden Henry Pope. The actor knows prison life inside out, having spent time behind bars after being convicted of smuggling cocaine into the UK in the 1980s.

Warden Pope believes in rehabilitation not punishment, running award-winning educational schemes for inmates. Mob boss and double murderer John Abruzzi still has 117 years of his sentence to do. Correctional officers enforce the rules, but he more or less runs the prison.

Time will tell whether Prison Break characters become best-cellers. They're certainly different from past prison characters like Faye Boswell, with her big hair and smart suits. She ran HMP Stone Park in the 1970s in ITV's Within These Walls.

As played by Googie Withers, she set about liberalising the regime in the women's prison. Both staff and inmates made life hard for her. She lasted three years, and successive governors - Helen Forrester and Susan Marshall - had little more success in changing things.

Stone Park was like a holiday camp compared to Wentworth Detention Centre, which housed Melbourne's toughest criminals in Prisoner: Cell Block H. Brutal warder Vera Bennett vied with lesbian biker and armed robber Franky Doyle to see who could be the meanest.

Creator Reg Watson was also behind the British soap Crossroads in which a motley band of people were imprisoned in a Midlands motel where the scenery was so wobbly that a breakout would have been easy.

Prisoner, as it was called Down Under, took a decade to reach British TV screens - presumably held up at customs as dangerous material - and had the Cell Block H bit added to avoid confusion with the mother of all prison dramas, The Prisoner. "I am not a number. I am a free man," Patrick McGoohan's Number 6 protested in that cult series.

The open prison in which he was confined was no ordinary one as the series was filmed at the Italian fantasy village Portmeirion in North Wales.

There's still no escape from Porridge, thanks to the BBC's endless repeats of the 1970s comedy series. Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais's script extracted laughs from old lag Norman Fletcher's stretch behind bars.

Porridge looks realistic next to Bad Girls, the gloriously trashy ITV series where it's often the turn of the screws to be nastier than the inmates. Its characters have passed into TV history, so when Helen Fraser, alias warder Sylvia "Bodybag" Hollamby, appeared in pantomime at Billingham Forum at Christmas she played Baroness Bodybag.

Bad Girls is now being turned into a theatre musical - opening at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, in May - following in the footsteps of Prisoner: Cell Block H, which took to the stage with a cast led by Lily Savage.

These women-behind-bars sagas are tame compared to Oz, the hit US series noted for its extreme violence and copious male nudity. Oz is the Oswald State Correctional Facility, where rape, lies, sex, stabbings, drugs, love and murder are a daily occurrence (sometimes all at the same time). Awful happenings in the experimental unit were chronicled by philosophical wheelchair-bound narrator Augustus Hill.

How different to Deirdre Rachid/Barlow's time behind bars in Coronation Street. Soap characters often spend a few days in jail over the years but few achieve the fame of Deirdre, falsely imprisoned on an embezzlement charge.

The cry went out "FREE THE WEATHERFIELD ONE" and she managed something no other TV prisoner has achieved - gaining the backing of Prime Minister Tony Blair for her campaign to get out of jail free.

Prison Break begins on five on Monday at 10pm.