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.

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........

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