3 ideas
Leo Feldman, a relentlessly driven department-store owner, runs a hidden basement operation that supplies customers with illicit goods and favours, but he is sent to prison on a bribery charge rather than for that trade. There Warden Fisher, a righteous administrator who governs through an elaborate code of rules, sets out to reform and break him, and the contest culminates in the other inmates putting Feldman on trial.
The warden's crusade is driven by the same totalizing will as Feldman's salesmanship: each man needs to impose his system on others completely. Reading the righteous authority as a rival compulsive, not a neutral corrective, shows that moral zeal can be a form of appetite. The fight becomes one between two monomaniacs, not between good and evil.
Feldman's ambition is shown as an inherited hunger, instilled by a father who drilled the peddler's imperative to sell and never rest. Because the drive predates any goal, it cannot be satisfied or switched off, even in prison. The 'bad man' is someone whose engine of striving has no governor, so he keeps dealing wherever he is put.