The informal role of prison philosopher is taken up by incarcerated people across the world. With time on their hands and a proximity to other people, systems of control and narratives of morality, people in prison are well positioned to practice philosophy.
This is the terrain that Dennis Kelly’s six-part BBC television drama Waiting for the Out, released earlier this year, covered. The series is an adaptation of Andy West’s memoir The Life Inside (2022), which shares his experiences of teaching philosophy in prison contexts and unfolds his own proximity to criminalisation through his father, uncle and brother, who all spent time in prison.
Jerry Bauer/Pantheon Books
We are theatre-makers who regularly co-create work with people living or working inside our criminal justice system. Saul with arts organisation Rideout Creative Arts for Rehabilitation and Sarah as a researcher and practitioner based at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Our latest collaboration explores the resonances and utility of French philosopher Michel Foucault’s influential 1975 work Discipline and Punish today.
Foucault’s book, which is core reading on most social sciences undergraduate curriculums, argues that since the late 18th century, punishment has morphed into discipline, a more diffuse form of surveillance and social control.
We were keen to investigate whether the book held meaning for people with lived experience of our criminal legal system today and understand what new insights they, in turn, might bring to Foucault’s work. We also drew inspiration from more contemporary writing, most fruitfully Henrique Carvalho and Anastasia Chamberlen’s nuanced interrogation of contemporary practices of punishment, Questioning Punishment (2023).
Read more:
I taught art in a high-security prison – Waiting for the Out took me straight back to my classroom
Putting justice centre stage
In spring of 2025, across ten initial drama workshops, we collaborated with members of Expert Citizens, an organisation led by and for people with lived experience of multiple disadvantage. We collectively explored power, punishing institutions and surveillance.
We went on to create an ensemble comprised of four Expert Citizens members and six theatre-makers. They shared creative, lived and theoretical knowledge with one another across a four-week intensive devising and rehearsal period.
Ultimately the ensemble created Punishment Acts: Tales of Retribution, Reparation and Redemption, an 80-minute production that was staged over seven nights at the B Arts theatre in Stoke on Trent.
Set in a prison cell late at night, between restless sleep and wakefulness, the cell’s occupants traverse different histories and spaces of punishment. Through a collage of puppetry, fable and movement, the show asked audiences to reflect on beliefs about punishment and consider whether there are other ways to achieve justice.
Punishment Acts sits in a landscape of theatre work that is increasingly interested in opening up conversations with audiences about what we want our justice system to look and feel like.
James Graham’s 2025 play Punch drew on Jacob Dunne’s memoir, Right from Wrong. Dunne’s book documents his conviction of manslaughter and the restorative justice process that brought him together with the parents of James Hodgkinson, the man he killed, so all three could begin to rebuild their lives. Punch staged the possibilities and processes of restorative justice as an alternative framework for responding to harm for a wider audience, initially at Nottingham Playhouse and then on to the West End and Broadway.
Synergy Theatre Company’s recent production of Evan Placey’s Lifers, meanwhile, invited audiences to consider how we respond to the ageing prison population and the broader harsh and dehumanising conditions of imprisonment in Britain. Bringing audiences attention to our rapidly shifting prison population and inviting them to ask what that might mean for the architecture, staffing and conditions within our prisons evidences the capacity of theatre to hold space for nuanced and humane reflections on justice.
Meanwhile Lung theatre company are currently touring Woodhill, a beautifully choreographed documentary piece that stages the acute failings at HMP Woodhill which led to catastrophic failures in care of the men held there. Chris Carpenter, Stephen Farrar and Kevin Scarlett were all held at the prison and each found dead in their cells between 2013 and 2018. Built on 70 interviews, the performance is a searing indictment of our failing prison system.
Theatre has long been a practice that invites audiences to (re)examine our relationship to the criminal justice system. What was distinctive about Punishment Acts is the explicit integration of philosophy, lived experience and community performance.
The importance of lived experience
Foucault’s ideas became less abstract through the ways our mixed cast could engage with and expand them in relation to contemporary prisons, probation and support services in Britain.
Punishment Acts was not autobiographical and used a fictional frame to enable some distance between cast members’ own stories and the characters in the play. But as one of the Expert Citizens mentors noted, the character they came up with embodied the frustrations they’d experienced in their own journey.
This was integral to the project and underscored how lived experience groups reanimate and offer useful perspectives on philosophy rather than the learning only going one way.
For example, the ensemble devised a scene in a hostel that blended Foucault’s discussion of how institutions organise space and time to enact control with their own experiences of punitive treatment in hostels.
In the play, the character of Melissa arrives at an Approved Premises looking for support, but is met with a long list of rigid and increasingly punitive rules from the use of the washing machine to the working hours of the communal kettle. The list is in fact so long it makes Melissa late for a probation appointment. When Melissa eventually meets her probation officer, an under resourced and overworked figure, another set of rules is deployed in lieu of support. Ultimately, her infringement of lateness lands her back in prison, back into the same cycle.
Melissa’s journey drew on Foucault’s proposal that punishment expands far beyond the prison gate and echoed the experiences of our ensemble. They also recognised that those working in these contexts (housing, justice, employment) are also being let down by systems that so often do not enable them to meaningfully support people.
The expansion of mainstream live performance, TV series and films addressing ideas around justice, harm, and punishment is to be welcomed. It marks an increased appetite from a broad range of people to examine the values, histories and philosophies of our criminal legal system.
Amid this growth in representation on our stages and screens, it’s vital to support community-rooted and research-informed performance projects. Such work brings people with different skills and experiences together, it foregrounds the knowledge of those who have had contact with our justice system, and enables us to collectively explore the fundamental ideas that inform our approach to punishment.
In addition to being a Teaching Fellow in Theatre Practice at University of Warwick, Saul Hewish is the Artistic Director of Rideout (Creative Arts for Rehabilitation).
Sarah Bartley’s research discussed here was part of a wider project entitled Staging Justice that was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, with additional support from Arts Council England.