The author, Ric Renton, appears in Waiting For The Out on BBC iPlayer.

“Boss? Boss… can I get a dictionary instead?” I shouted, sat on the floor in the corner of my pad in the ‘hole’ (a cell in solitary confinement).

Having just fucked off, on my command, after offering me a bible, the benevolent screw returned: “Y’takin the piss?”

“No,” I replied.

Several hours later, the food hatch opens and a dictionary comes skidding unceremoniously across the floor.

Solitary’s a grim place, in case you had any misconceptions. All unfinished surfaces. They take your mattress and bedding from you at 6am and return them at 8pm so you can’t sleep all day – and the only official place to sit was on this metal plank welded into the wall.

That would have been alright were it not for the other one perfectly aligned with it that acted as a table, meaning your only option was sitting with a perfectly straight spine for 10 hours. Orthopedically, it’s genius. Practically, it’s malevolent.

Pacing the circumference of my new temporary home, dictionary in hand, eyes pinched, trying to decipher what the fuck it all meant, having as much fun as dunking my nards in molten tar, I had little clue (that’s a lie, I had no clue) that I was building a framework that would one day lead me to writing and acting professionally.

March 2024 marked 20 years and one month since my release from HMP Durham, then a category A prison.

So it felt canny cosmic sitting in the stylishly decorated offices of SISTER, waiting (I’m always the first to arrive. Always.) for the others to join the writers’ room to discuss adapting Andy West’s memoir, A Life Inside.

“I’m here as a nefarious pseudo-consultant to season the incubating story with some sizzling authenticity,” I thought, waiting for the doors to swing open. Which was fine. It wasn’t my........

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