Prisoners: Parental Rights

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Wednesday 13th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Hosie. I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) on securing the debate. We have had some excellent speeches, and Westminster Hall comes into its own in debates on such topics with cross-party consensus.

I want to turn the debate around slightly and focus on the 200,000 or so children a year who will have a parent in prison, in England and Wales. That is a rough figure—a Government estimate—and it is difficult to be more precise. We have heard various figures about women in prison. It is estimated that 66% of women in prison have a child under the age of 18, and that a third of them have a child under five, although I have also seen the figure of 51%. Far more children have a father than a mother in prison and there are likely to be a disproportionate number of black and minority ethnic children with a parent in prison, because of the make-up of the prison population. The statistics on young offenders institutions show that there are also many young parents in prison. I have visited young offenders institutions as an MP and before that as a lawyer working in the criminal field, and those who do so will have seen young mums turning up with their babies, to visit fathers who are themselves children. A freedom of information request from Barnardo’s in connection with its report of December 2015, “Locked out: Children’s experiences of visiting a parent in prison”, found that children make almost 10,000 visits to public prisons each week.

Those are the things that we know about the number of children affected, and the make-up of that group, but we do not know anywhere near as much as we should. There is limited published practice knowledge about working with children of prisoners, and a lack of systematic recording and information-sharing. Prisoners will not always reveal that they have children. In many cases it is a child’s step-parent or the partner of their parent rather than their own father who is in prison, but the child will still clearly be greatly affected. As we have heard, courts, Governments and local services do not routinely ask about the children involved; that information is not reported or recorded. Pressures on the probation service and the lack of sentencing reports also mean that the issue is less likely to be picked up. My hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) pointed out that people facing custody are not routinely asked about the situation with respect to their children.

When there were riots and looting in London boroughs after the death of Mark Duggan, in quite a few cases women were immediately thrown into custody and no one asked any questions. Single parents were put into custody and no one asked what would happen to their children left at home.

[Kate Green]

Does my hon. Friend support the suggestion that when a parent goes into custody—and particularly if they are the sole parent—there should be a period of perhaps five or seven days after the sentence is imposed and before custody commences to allow them to make arrangements for the care of the child?

[Kerry McCarthy]

That is absolutely the case, although there will always be exceptions, such as when the parent is seen to be a danger to the public. I used to work at a magistrates court, where women would be sentenced to jail because they had not paid television licence fines. It could be said that they knew they were coming to court and might face custody, but sometimes those people had chaotic lives and were not facing up to the seriousness of their situation, and it would be sensible to give them a chance to make arrangements. In America there is a tendency to use a system that gives people time to prepare for a prison sentence; I do not see why we cannot do that here.

Quite often parents going to jail, and their families, keep quiet about the fact that children are involved. That might be because of stigma and shame, or the fear of having their children taken into care. Informal kinship care is often arranged, with friends or family stepping in if the parent with caring responsibilities is sent away. There has been some progress in recognising the role of kinship carers in recent years. Edward Timpson, the former Children and Families Minister, took the issue seriously and did some good work on it, which we need to continue.

I recently wrote to the Children’s Commissioner about the matter. She had launched a very good report that identified about 15 categories of vulnerable children, and I wrote to her flagging up the fact that the categories of children of prisoners and children in informal kinship care should have been listed but were not. There would have been some overlap as, for example, one category was children in local authority care, which could include the children of prisoners; but there was not a specific focus on them. I received a good reply this week, in which the commissioner said:

“I am very keen to include children of prisoners in the next iteration of the work, but identifying the number of such children is a significant challenge. We are currently working with the ONS to link census data with Dept for Education records of children, this should then enable us to estimate the number of children in families where a parent is in prison. Doing this poses some serious challenges, but if we can do it, then we will be able to use this to get lots of additional information.”

Things are not ideal. The information should be available without the need to do various calculations to put together a picture; but it is excellent that the commissioner realises the importance of the work.

It is important to know how many children are affected by parental imprisonment. Such children can face multiple disadvantages, as has been said. Family life is disrupted and it may be necessary to move home. My hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston mentioned that half of such children have to change schools. In many cases family income will be lost. For children with a parent in prison there is twice the likelihood of poor conduct and mental health problems, according to a 2008 study. Those children are less likely to do well at school and three times as likely to offend: 65% of boys with a convicted father will go on to be convicted. When Hazel Blears was a Home Office Minister we had conversations about work she was doing to try to identify boys, in particular, who were at risk of offending because of their parents’ situation. There is a need to be careful about that, because we do not want to stigmatise or label children—“Because your father was a bad lot and ended up in jail you are going to go the same way.” A sensitive approach is needed, but we must recognise the particular risk for those children.

Trauma can also arise directly from the experience. Children may have seen a parent arrested, sometimes in violent circumstances. They may not have known anything was going on, only for the parent to go off to court one day and disappear. Some children may not even be told that the parent is in jail, and may find out because word has spread around the neighbourhood. Also, visiting a parent in prison is not a pleasant experience. In today’s debate there has been a focus on the importance to prisoners of maintaining contact with their children; and the reoffending figures suggest that that is important. It is estimated that 45% of prisoners lose touch with their families and that prisoners are 39% less likely to reoffend if they receive visitors. We also need to look at the impact on the children, as Barnardo’s has tried to do, because what is good for the prisoners is not necessarily good for the children.

I will briefly mention fathers’ rights. We have spoken about women receiving visits in prison, but male prisoners are treated differently from female prisoners in the system. I entirely accept the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East that in some cases the father clearly should not retain any influence over the children’s lives.

At the moment, in male prisons, children’s visits are classed as a privilege under the incentives and earned privileges scheme. The scheme allocates the duration, frequency and quality of visits according to the behaviour of the offender. That can have quite a severe impact on the frequency and length of visits. Basic status prisoners would be entitled to see their children for a two-hour visit every four weeks, but family visit days are restricted to enhanced prisoners who have displayed exemplary behaviour, for example by studying for qualifications. Therefore, quite a lot of prisoners do not get to have family visit days at all. We could say, “Well, they haven’t earned them,” but we are talking about their families losing that right through no fault of their own.

Children in this situation will often have ambivalent feelings toward their parent, because their parent has perhaps done something deliberately that means they have, in effect, abandoned their child. Children will see that their parent has chosen to do something that means they will be locked up and absent from the home, leaving the children to fend for themselves or endure bullying and stigma at school. They should not be doubly punished for the fact that their father is perhaps not displaying exemplary behaviour in prison; they should be allowed that quality time to try to rebuild the relationship with him.

Under the IEP scheme, fathers’ visits with their children can be withheld at the discretion of the authorities, whereas in female prisons the right is protected, on the basis that children should not be restricted from visiting or contacting the mother because of the mother’s behaviour. The number of visits should not be restricted in order to serve the needs of the incentive schemes, and incentive schemes should not be linked to any access to family visits. That is the rule for mothers, and I do not see why it should not be the case for fathers as well. It is important, and Barnardo’s has called for the IEP scheme in male prisons to be brought into line with that in female prisons.

I will say a little bit about the work of Barnardo’s, an organisation that is proactive in this area and doing some excellent work. In England there is a scheme called i-HOP—the information hub on offenders’ families with children for professionals—which was commissioned by the Department for Education and is run by Barnardo’s. It provides a one-stop information and advice service to support all professionals working with children and families of offenders, including frontline staff, strategic managers and commissioners. It is important that this is placed on professionals’ radar and that they are given advice on how to deal with it.

In 2013, Barnardo’s published a report called “Working with children with a parent in prison”, which referred to two pilot schemes called Empowering the Children of Offenders. The pilots were held in Devon and Bristol. They found that parents often struggled to talk to their children about imprisonment and needed support to do so. They also found that liaising with wider family networks, including grandparents, and with schools was vital to provide full support to a child affected by parental imprisonment. The report highlighted particular issues: problems in identifying the children affected, as I have already said, identifying the children’s rights and working out which children need support. The children of prisoners often do not meet the thresholds for children’s social care services to become involved. That means no work takes place with them, and perhaps the thresholds should be reassessed to ensure they are brought into account.

As part of the i-HOP scheme in Bristol, Barnardo’s worked with Bristol City Council to create Bristol’s “Charter for Children of Prisoners”, which recommended that children should be helped to write letters, make phone calls or visit if they want to; that children with a parent in prison should be better welcomed and respected by prison staff; that children should be told where their parent is and how long they will be there; that they should have an adult they can talk to in confidence; and that when police arrest someone they should take into account the impact on the child and ensure the situation is explained to them. Probably most importantly, it recommended that professionals such as teachers and nurses should know how many children in Bristol have a parent in prison and how to support them.

I will conclude by coming back to my earlier point. This discussion should not just be about the prisoners and their rights; it should be about the children. When we look at the children of prisoners, we should not just look at their relationship with the parent in prison. It should not just be about how often they see them and whether they maintain connection. They will face a lot of issues, whether at school, through poverty in the family home, or through informal arrangements where they may be passed from one friend of their parent to another. We need to look at those children in the community, not just in relation to the prisoners.