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Luke survived
- The last we see of Luke, he's been shot in the neck. The warden says he'll take him back to the prison and a cop comments that he'll never survive the trip. It is possible to survive a shot in the neck, and it's possible that the warden had second thoughts and brought Luke to the nearest ER instead. (After all, he could get in trouble if a prisoner died when there was a reasonable chance of saving him). Then he just transferred him to a different prison rather than put up with his antics any longer.
- Luke and Dragline eventually meet up again as free men, several years later.
The prison staff got punished in the end
- Luke gets shot in the neck by Godfrey, and local cops witness the whole thing. Luke wasn't attacking anyone at the moment he got shot, and he wasn't even running away. He'd just given a calm "What we have here is a failure to communicate", which could easily be taken as something a man might say just before surrendering, as in "Let's discuss the details of my surrender before somebody gets jumpy and shoots me for no reason". It's possible that the local cops were appalled. One of them says that Luke should be taken to the nearest ER, but the warden insists on bringing him back to the prison, even though it's an hour away and Luke won't survive the trip. The local cops could plausibly report this up the chain of command as prisoner abuse, and maybe the warden and Godfrey and all the rest of them eventually got fired in the end. Maybe Luke made a major difference after all, and the movie just happens to end before we can see it.
