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This two-reel Stan Laurel comedy (made three years before he teamed up with Oliver Hardy) was produced by Joe Rock -- it was Laurel's first film after leaving the Hal Roach studios. Laurel plays a convict who is in love with the warden's daughter (Julie Leonard). He and another inmate try to burrow out of the prison but instead wind up in the warden's office (this gag was used twice again in the Laurel and Hardy film The Second Hundred Years and The Flying Deuces). Eventually, Stan is pardoned, but by then, the warden and his daughter have grown so fond of him that they're all saddened when he is pardoned. Stan solves their dilemma by picking the warden's pocket as he makes his exit. Some of the gags are borrowed from a previous Stan Laurel film, Picks and Shovels. Much of Detained is lost to time and disintegration; only parts of the footage remain.