The painting is naive in style, but raw in its intensity, and it shows a woman’s face against a forbidding brick wall. The nose is displaced by a man’s fist, and over the woman’s shoulder leers a moustached man.

Sam, a pretty blonde woman with a troubled stare, stands in front of her artwork and, in a clear voice, sings a ballad telling of a violent father, an abusive husband and a troubled life:

A husband’s fist,
a Picasso face,
my sister pushing it
back into place.

Sam is one of the women from Downview Prison, Surrey, whose experiences have been turned into songs — lyrics by the poet Simon Armitage, music by the film composer Simon Boswell — for a Channel 4 musical documentary, Songbirds.

The programme follows the same format as Feltham Sings, the award-winning 2003 documentary in which young male offenders sang about their lives. Songbirds is, if anything, still more moving, because of the women’s disarming honesty. They sing of lost children, drugs, violent crime and bad marriages. In a straight documentary their stories might be merely depressing, but set to music they are by turns heart-rending, farcical and oddly jolly.

Once recorded, the songs were re-shot like simple pop videos, the highlight being a lively number about drug mules. Some, such as “Scary” Mary, talk their songs Rex Harrison-style, but others, including Sam, have excellent, tuneful voices.

The experience broke the tedium of prison life, says director Brian Hill, and they loved Armitage’s poems. Sam has clearly gained confidence from the process, as much as anything for the light touch on grim material. “It was a nice way of telling my story,’ she says, “without going too deep.”

CELINE AND NATASHA

Celine and Natasha are two sisters from the South of France and in their twenties. Natasha was studying law and Celine was working in bars in Paris and Amsterdam when they were caught at a UK airport, flying to New York with two packets of Ecstasy each in their suitcases.

They knew they were smuggling, they say, but thought it was jewellery (to evade import duty). The judge told them that, taking into consideration that they were young, foreign nationals and that their parents lived far away, he would give them only 18 years each.

THERESA

Theresa is a small, anxious woman of 55. Polite, considerate, and a mother of three, she nevertheless has a conviction for manslaughter with diminished responsibility and is now on probation, having served part of a three- and-a-half year sentence.

Her story is not at all typical of the women at Downview, but highlights one of the blights of our age: noisy neighbours. Her troubles began when she and her husband bought their first house together in Walthamstow, East London. A problem family moved in over the road. There were loud parties and constant thumping music, accompanied by abuse and intimidation on the street. The police and council seemed impotent. After six years the family left and Theresa felt able to sell their house. They headed for the sanctuary of Sussex.