THIS tightly woven Strictly Arts production, opening with a series of agonising sequences representing the victims’ tormented fates, initially focuses on the 1846 case of William Freeman, a black New York boy wrongly imprisoned.

Suffering from years of physical abuse that left him permanently brain damaged, on release he senselessly murdered four white people and was sentenced to be hanged, despite his lawyer's plea of insanity caused by his brutalisation in prison.

United by their abusive treatment by police and prison warders, the story of the other characters brings the story up to date with the 2016 death of black woman Sarah Reed in Holloway Prison. Debilitated by mental-health problems, her case revealed abject failings within the penal system.