Prisoners: Parental Rights

Imran Hussain Excerpts

Wednesday 13th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Imran Hussain (Bradford East) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) for securing this important debate. I know she has a keen interest in it through her work. Sometimes the importance of this subject is lost because it does not get as much coverage as it should, so I am pleased that we are debating it today.

My hon. Friend made a powerful and passionate case that the paramount issue must always be the safeguarding of children. She is absolutely right, and the horrendous case she referred to shows that those considerations must come first, along with where children are abused and the element of domestic violence. She is right that some of those safeguards are not in place as they should be in the system. Without repeating what she said, I look forward to the Minister’s response to some of the important questions she asked, particularly on the safeguarding of children.

I am grateful to other hon. Members who made speeches about the broader debate, which I would like to concentrate on. In particular, references were made to the Farmer review. These issues date back to the early 1990s, when we had the Woolf report after the disturbances in Strangeways. Both those reports, and many other recommendations, have proved not only that parents have a right to see their children and that prisoners have a right to see their families, but that there are massive benefits. I will concentrate my remarks on some of the obstacles that children face during visitation, and the impact on both parents and children.

My first point was alluded to earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy)—parents are not recorded in the current system. In 2009, the Ministry of Justice estimated that 200,000 children had a parent in prison. That is an estimate—there is no accurate figure, because the Government do not record which prisoners are parents. What we know is that female prisoners are more affected because they are more likely to be sole parents. Without records, there is no capability to give children better visitation access to parents, no capability to treat children better and no capability to improve parental rights. Indeed, there is no capability to deal with some of the safeguarding issues to which my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East referred.

Hon. Members have mentioned the cost and distance involved in visiting. Across England and Wales, many prisoners are imprisoned far from home, which means expensive journeys and long travelling distances. The Government’s new prison building plan and the super-sized prisons that they seem set on will make that challenge worse not better, because reducing the number of prison locations will force many families to journey even further. Children face even greater difficulty visiting their mothers. They are often located much further away owing to the lower number of female prisons. Children living in Wales whose mothers are in prison have to leave the country to visit them. It is disappointing that the Ministry of Justice has brushed over that in its building plans by not addressing the lack of female prisons in Wales.

Cost and distance are not the only challenges. Once families have overcome them, children and carers have to deal with prison rules and the prison environment. As has been pointed out, visiting times mean that, even if a prison is close to a child’s home, it is necessary to take them out of school, which many parents may be reluctant to do on a frequent basis, thereby limiting the child’s time with the parent in prison. While inside prison, children are subject to searches and an unwelcoming environment that can put them off. It does not get any better when a child is with their parent because the rules prevent meaningful social interactions between them.

The biggest impact for parents is on reoffending rates—the odds of reoffending are 39% lower for prisoners who receive family visits than for those who do not. The recent Farmer review was very clear that better interaction between offenders and their families improves reoffending rates and rehabilitation. If an offender does not see their family, they will often lose them. Once they have lost their family, there is often little left for them to lose by reoffending—they will have missed out on their child’s key development and defining moments, and on memories. A parent who has a stake in their child’s life can endeavour to serve as a positive role model and can turn their own life around.

A lack of access to children has been shown to have an impact on prison disturbances. As I stated earlier, that was found as far back as the Woolf report in the 1990s.

The impact is particularly strong for female offenders, the majority of whom commit non-violent offences and crimes of poverty that often warrant better support rather than imprisonment. One in three female prisoners are mothers of children under 18, and one in five are lone parents who face their children being taken away from them following their imprisonment.

Some 70% of female prisoners are serving sentences of less than six months, but that is all that is needed for them to lose their job, their home and their children, not just for those six months but forever. Without a secure job or home after release, they face an uphill struggle to get their children back from care, so it makes sense for parents in prison to have better parental rights and better contact with their children. Surely our desire to rehabilitate an offender and to help them turn their life around for the better, and to give a child a parent they can look up to, is greater than our desire to punish them and therefore to punish an innocent child in the process.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East is absolutely right that this has to be looked at in a broader context, with the rights of children having absolutely equal value. Having a parent in prison means that a child is three times more likely to turn to crime themselves—65% of boys with a convicted father go on to offend themselves. Having a parent in prison means that a child is much more likely to be uprooted from their home, with just one in 20 staying in their own home while one in 10 go into care, or are fostered or adopted. Having a parent in prison means that a child’s development is much more likely to be hampered, with additional pressure piled upon them such as disorientation from moving and stigmas that result in bullying.

All of that means that those children do less well at school than their peers. However, the impact is much deeper, because lack of parental rights mean that a child’s mum or dad has been ripped out of their life for what seems to the child like an eternity. Proper parental rights and visitation mean that the whole experience will not be as daunting for a child, and that the adverse impacts are not as great.

The Government must address a number of issues. First, they must address safeguarding measures and the questions raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East. Secondly, they have to record whether offenders have children, to better understand the impact of imprisonment and cater for their children. With that information, the Government have to look seriously at the merits of Barnardo’s recommendation of allowing children better access to their parents.

Thirdly, the Government must look seriously at the sentencing of mothers, who are disproportionately affected. There is a debate to be had on whether some women would be better served by smaller, more local women’s centres. Finally, they need to take another look at their prison building programme, because there is a question over whether super-sized prisons are the answer to everything.