The new series of Time is not an easy watch. The opening seconds of Jimmy McGovern’s prison drama show a normal woman on a normal bus, as it drives up a normal road. But to the right of that road is a huge concrete wall, topped with barbed wire and CCTV cameras.

The wall is only partly visible, just as prisons themselves tend to occupy a space towards the very edges of our thoughts. They exist, but not as part of normal life. But McGovern’s drama shows just how permeable that wall is.

The show’s fictional young offender institution, HMYOI Alderwick, is a place that boils with anger. As new arrivals enter the prison, an officer tells them: “Keep going, ignore the noise.” As if you ever could. The sound of prisoners shouting and kicking their cell doors is an assault on the ears. Those scenes are louder than any headline, of which there are plenty these days; overcrowding, escapes from custody, the latest early-release scheme. What McGovern does is crank the volume so loud it’s impossible to block out.

The reality is that prisons are closer to us than they might seem. The Sentencing Act 2026 allows prisoners serving standard determinate sentences to be released after serving only a third of their sentence in custody. The early-release scheme is intended to help relieve the prison........

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