Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many children had at least one parent who was imprisoned in each year for the last five years.

The Government is committed to supporting prisoners to establish or maintain relationships with their families where appropriate. Lord Farmer published his report in August on improving family relationships for those in prison. Work has already commenced on taking forward some of the important recommendations from this review.

The Ministry of Justice does not collect data on the number of children who have a parent in prison. An MoJ longitudinal study of adult prisoners estimated that there were around 200,000 children who had a parent in prison at some point during 2009.

In 2015, MoJ published analysis which estimated that in 2012 between 13-19% of women serving an immediate custodial sentence had at least one dependent child in their care. On average, this group of women had 1.8 children each.

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/465916/female-offenders-child-dependents-statistics.pdf