Prisoners and their children: An innovative model of ‘whole family’ support

Background

As prison populations have grown across the world, so too have the numbers of children with a parent in custody. In the USA, an official estimate based on prisoner surveys (Glaze and Maruschak, 2008) produced a figure of 1,706,600 for 2007, almost double the estimate for 1991. It has further been calculated that over five million American children have experienced parental imprisonment at some point in their lives (Murphey and Cooper, 2015). A ‘minimum’ estimate of 800,000 children across the European Union with a parent in custody has been quoted many times, but is probably well below the true total (Jones and Wainaina-Woźna, 2013). The Ministry of Justice’s figure of 200,000 such children in England and Wales in 2009 is also likely to be an underestimate (Condry et al., 2016).

Numerous studies have shown that the families of prisoners are likely to experience significant loss of income, increased levels of stress, stigma and isolation from social networks (Arditti, 2012; Brink, 2003; Codd, 1998; Hagan and Dinovitzer, 1999; Mauer and Chesney-Lind, 2002; Murray, 2005; Smith et al., 2007; Travis and Waul, 2003). It has also been estimated that over one in five married prisoners become separated or divorced as a result of going to prison (Robertson, 2007; Sienneck et al., 2014). The impact of these strains upon children can be particularly damaging. Common problems identified include aggressive and anti-social behaviour, depression, anxiety, sleeping and eating disorders, truancy, and poor educational performance (Arditti, 2012; Barnardo’s, 2015; Boswell and Wedge, 2002; Gabel and Johnston, 1995; Gill and Deegan, 2016; Jones and Wainaina-Woźna, 2013; Murray, 2007; Murray et al., 2012). Having a parent in prison as a child has also been associated with significantly increased risks of problems in adulthood including mental illness, unemployment, substance misuse and antisocial behavior (Lee et al., 2013; Lewis et al., 2008; Murray and Farrington, 2008; Murray et al., 2012). It has further been identified as a likely contributory factor to the problem of ‘intergenerational offending’, adding to the already high risk of offending associated with being the child of an offender (see, for example, Besemer and Farrington, 2012; Huebner and Gustafson, 2007; Murray and Farrington, 2005). It should, however, be noted that because it is difficult to disentangle the long-term effects of parental imprisonment from those of other forms of disadvantage suffered by the children of offenders, claims of causation should be treated with caution (Flynn, 2013; Murray and Farrington, 2008). Knudsen (2016) adds the important warning that practitioners should not react to evidence of enhanced risks of future offending by making ‘homogenizing or pathologizing’ assumptions about all children with a parent in prison.

Research has also highlighted the value of maintaining family ties during a prison sentence. Much of this research, particularly studies conducted by criminologists or criminal justice agencies, has focused primarily on benefits relating to the rehabilitation of offenders. For example, in the UK a series of Home Office resettlement surveys found that prisoners visited or supported by family members while in prison had considerably lower reoffending rates than those who were not (May et al. 2008; Williams et al., 2012), while a more rigorous study in the USA using propensity score matching found that ‘visitation’, particularly by spouses or significant others, had a ‘small to modest’ effect in reducing recidivism (Mears et al., 2012). In addition, studies of the impact of family-related interventions such as parenting programmes and relationship counselling have found increases in prisoners’ self-esteem, problem-solving and relationship skills, improvements in behaviour in custody, and reductions in substance misuse (Boswell and Poland, 2008, 2011; Carlson, 2001; Einhorn et al., 2008; Hunter et al., 2013; Klein and Bahr, 1996; Wilczak and Markstrom, 1999; Wilson et al., 2010).

In formulating explanations for the importance of family contact in the rehabilitation of prisoners, a number of scholars have emphasised its capacity to maintain or increase their levels of social capital – the bonds and links an individual has with family, friends, neighbours, and wider social and work-related networks (see, for example, Farrall and Calverley, 2006; Laub and Sampson, 1993; Savolainen, 2009). It is hypothesised that those with higher levels of social capital are less likely to engage in criminal behaviour as they have more to lose and are more firmly ‘bonded’ to conventional societal norms and more stable, pro-social relationships. Desistance theorists have further argued that assisting offenders to change their core ‘personal narrative’ or ‘sense of self’ from that of a ‘criminal’ or ‘drug user’ to, for example, one of ‘family member’ or ‘parent’ can have a positive effect on offending behaviour (McNeill and Weaver, 2010; Maruna, 2001).

However, it has also been pointed out that while the rehabilitation of offenders is obviously a desirable goal, the burden of support for prisoners’ resettlement often falls upon the families themselves (and overwhelmingly upon their female members). Condry (2007) highlights the personal costs to the wives, girlfriends and mothers of male prisoners as the demands of supporting them through their sentence are not only time consuming and financially draining, but also deeply emotional (see also, Comfort, 2008; Light, 1993; Light and Campbell, 2007). More recently, Jardine (2017) warns against placing further emotional and financial requirements upon prisoners’ families by positioning them as both a source of support throughout the sentence and as a resettlement resource on release. This is particularly pertinent in the current climate of austerity, when many are already experiencing major hardship.

This, together with evidence of threats to the well-being of children, adds fuel to the argument for a ‘whole family’ approach to resettlement: in short, that policy and practice implemented under the banner of ‘Children and Families’ work (see below) should not give disproportionate priority to rehabilitative outcomes for offenders, but should pay equal attention to ways of achieving benefits for partners and children. Research findings on how and to what extent such benefits can be achieved are more limited. For example, the impact of family-oriented interventions on prisoners’ children is often extrapolated from evidence of change in the fathers, such as improvements in their parenting skills (Wilson et al., 2010) or self-reported improvements in their relationships or communication with their children (Halsey et al., 2002; Prinsloo, 2007). There is, however, some useful evidence from a quantitative study by Lösel et al. (2012) aimed at determining the factors that best predict ‘good resettlement outcomes’ for whole families (ex-prisoners, their partners and children). The researchers found that high quality contact and frequent communication between prisoner and family, the father’s participation in parenting courses, and social support to both parents from family and friends, were associated with better resettlement outcomes for all core family members – including, for children, better adjustment, fewer conduct problems, more pro-social behavior, and fewer educational difficulties and experiences of bullying at school.

There is also some qualitative evidence from projects run by the children’s charity Barnardo’s that work in the community with prisoners’ children can have a highly beneficial effect. The ECHO services run in Bristol and Devon between 2009 and 2011, which encouraged workers to spend time talking directly to children about their relationships with their fathers and their feelings about prison, reported significant improvements in family relationships and in some children’s emotional wellbeing, behaviour and/or school attendance (Gill and Deegan, 2013). More recently, an evaluation of the Community Support for Offenders’ Families (CSOF) service, which provided a range of support and assistance to partners and children – in about half the cases without meeting the parent in prison – found that levels of stress had decreased for 74% of the adult service users, and self-esteem had increased for about half of the children (Barnardo’s, 2015).

The importance of attention to prisoners’ family relationships has been recognised in policy statements by the UK government for some time. ‘Children and Families of Offenders’ was one of the seven main ‘Pathways’ to rehabilitation identified in the original Reducing Reoffending Action Plan for England and Wales (Home Office, 2004), and the topic has been included in many subsequent official plans and guidelines. In 2009, the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Children, Schools and Families jointly developed a framework for improving support to offenders’ families (MoJ and DCSF, 2009). This introduced the ‘Think Family’ concept, with the aim of improving awareness of the needs of offenders’ children and families at each stage of the criminal justice process. It also led to a Prison Service Instruction (PSI 16/2011, Providing Visits and Services to Visitors) to all establishments, emphasising the importance of family ties for the reduction of both re-offending and intergenerational offending, and setting out minimum standards for visiting arrangements and facilities. More recently, the National Offender Management Service (NOMS, now renamed Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service – HMPPS) included family and marital relationships as a ‘criminogenic need’, linking this to the wider Troubled Families programme run by the Department for Communities and Local Government. The agency’s statement of ‘Commissioning Intentions’ (NOMS, 2014) lists relationship coaching and family visits as ‘promising approaches’, as well as recommending interventions that target both the offender and his/her family:

We recognise that supporting and maintaining links between offenders and their families can help reduce reoffending. Doing so can contribute to tackling inter-generational offending by addressing the poor outcomes faced by children of offenders. (NOMS, 2014: 23)

Such pronouncements have undoubtedly had some effect. Parenting and relationship skills programmes are now quite common in British prisons. More prisons offer extended family visits and some have established children’s centres to make visiting a more child-friendly experience. Again, some establishments have appointed Family Support workers to provide a casework service to prisoners and their families. However, the overall picture remains patchy, and progress has been reliant to a considerable extent on the voluntary sector and short-term funding grants. In the words of Lord Farmer (2017: 44):

During the course of the Review it became clear to me that the commendable vision of the 2009 framework, as regards recognition of the importance of family ties and support to maintain and improve these, has never been fully realised in practice. As I said in my Introduction, research commissioned by the Government bears out my conclusion. Governors need to be held accountable for delivering against these responsibilities, including by demonstrating the positive outcomes that research indicates will flow from good family work.

A similarly inconsistent picture obtains across most of Europe. There are some important landmarks, such as the Memorandum of Understanding signed by the Italian government in 2014, ³ which protects the rights of children of prisoners particularly in relation to access to their parents and visiting conditions. Some recognition of the problems they face is also apparent in statements of principle at European level, such as the inclusion of children of imprisoned parents in the Council of Europe’s Strategy on the Rights of the Child (2016–2021) as one of the ‘most vulnerable and marginalised groups’ (section II,1), together with a statement that the Council will ‘consider addressing [their] situation’ (section III,4.2). However, the overall situation is summed up in a consultation paper for the European Commission in 2011, in which the European Network for Children of Imprisoned Parents ⁴ stated:

In practice, however, both the quality and quantity of the contact between parents and children depends very much on individual prisons. From our wider knowledge across many EU states, EUROCHIPS is aware that good practice can be found in all jurisdictions but, unfortunately, these are rarely mainstreamed across the whole prison estate, social services or police service and it is clear that security and control issues often over-ride children’s interests. (Gampell and Ayre 2011: 9)

Similar conclusions were reached in studies across Europe described by Jones and Wainaina-Woźna, (2013) and Sharratt (2014).

The IWW project

It was against this broad background of worthy general statements and good intentions, but underinvestment, piecemeal policy and limited effective practice, that IWW was conceived and planned as a potential ‘game-changer’. When operating at full capacity, it was undoubtedly the most ambitious, comprehensive and coherent family support programme ever implemented in a British prison. This was made possible by an exceptionally large grant from the Big Lottery, which permitted the employment of a sizeable multi-agency project team, inside and outside the prison, for more than four years. During this period, 83 male prisoners and their partners (or other carers) and children – a total of 349 individuals – were intensively supported for a period of 6–12 months during the custodial part of the father’s sentence and up to six months post release. The project’s primary aims were defined as improving participants’ quality of family life and community inclusion, reducing re-offending by the father, and reducing the risk of intergenerational offending. Adopting an explicitly ‘whole family’ approach, project staff sought to motivate and engage all those involved, maintain and improve relationships between the prisoners and their families, and help address participants’ practical and emotional needs both as individuals and as a family. Its managers also set out to influence policy and practice elsewhere by welcoming visitors to learn about the project and giving frequent talks about the IWW model in national and international forums.

Although IWW involved a relatively small group of prisoners within a large establishment, it was by no means an isolated project. On the contrary, it can be seen as the cherry on the top of a substantial cake. It emerged out of an ongoing series of family-related reforms in HMP Parc, dating back over several years. In 2006, a small steering group of staff from a multi-disciplinary background was formed under the name of Parc Supporting Families (PSF) to develop strategies to operationalise the concept of a ‘Children and Families Pathway’ (Home Office, 2004). In 2009, the PSF opened the UK’s first Family Interventions Unit (FIU) for male prisoners. The FIU is a 62-bed drug free unit for prisoners who are parents. As will be discussed later in more detail, it offers a range of group and individual interventions aimed at repairing, maintaining and enhancing family relationships, some of which can be attended jointly by FIU residents, their partners and children, extra prison visits being permitted for this purpose.

Another significant step was taken in 2010, when responsibility for the management of prison visits was transferred from security staff to PSF, who sought to replace the traditional security led approach to visits with an ‘interventions-led’ model. This represented a significant conceptual and cultural shift, whereby staff were encouraged to view each visit as an opportunity to engage with the prisoner and his children and family. To enable this, the main visits hall underwent major refurbishment, producing a much more welcoming environment and including a colourful children’s play area. In addition, a ‘Family Interventions Lounge’ was created, a comfortable side room where prisoners and their families can meet more privately during ‘family centred visits’. These take place outside normal visiting hours and are now available on an earned rota basis to any prisoner with children. They often include activities or interventions delivered by PSF staff or workers from external agencies. Examples include Learning Together Club, Moving Parents and Children Together, Baby Bathing sessions for new parents, Five to Thrive, and Rhyme-Time. Moreover, the management team is continually open to new ideas. For example, they have recently introduced a Scouts Group, a St John’s First Aid course and a ‘Come Dine with Me’ experience. The following comments from a senior manager give a flavour of the innovative spirit that prevails:

Our more recent family interventions in there are with Scouts Wales. We have the Glyndwr Scouts group . . . a scout leader comes in and delivers that, we have volunteers who support it and they have own kit . . . We tell the prisoners through the CMS system and posters, we tell the schools, we tell their families. The scouts group meet upstairs in the visits hall, we also have the lounge and we will have new areas we are opening shortly as well. With St John’s, we have both adults and their children, 5 or 6 families together in the lounge to teach them household first aid. That’s family engagement . . . Two officers from Parc also visited Oakwood and brought back the idea of ‘Come Dine with Me’. As a reward for good behaviour, the prisoner pays £10 and in the visits hall they get a meal with their partner (and children if they want). They have a menu to choose from, the works for, say, the cleanest cell, the most improved on a programme, things like that. Four families get this restaurant experience every six weeks.

Finally, 2014 saw the opening of the Susan Ellis Interventions Led Visitor Centre (ILVC), a new building outside the prison gates where all visitors are ‘booked in’. The ILVC was purpose built as a child and family friendly environment and provides visiting families with opportunities to benefit from engagement with staff and a range of activities while waiting to go into the prison. In 2016, responsibility for running the Centre, including the booking-in process, was handed over to Barnardo’s, a major children’s charity, with the aim of creating a more welcoming and positive atmosphere at the ‘front end’ of visits. Barnardo’s-led initiatives now run in the ILVC include a swap shop for clothes; brief workshops on literacy, healthy eating, cultural awareness, hygiene and dental care; and a Santa’s grotto.

In short, while other prisons undoubtedly cater for visiting families in some similar ways, the sheer scale and variety of the child- and family-friendly facilities in Parc are clearly exceptional. Both in the ILVC outside the gate and in the refurbished visits hall, the use of plants, colour and art, together with the informal dress of staff (the Barnardo’s staff in the ILVC wear green T-shirts) and the availability of activities and play areas, create a welcoming environment for ‘ordinary’ visits as well as encouragement to families and prisoners to engage jointly in more substantial interventions (by the prisoner earning the right to ‘family-centred’ visits in the Lounge).

The IWW project was embedded within, and took advantage of, this infrastructure within the prison. Many of the services which IWW participants received were available at times to other prisoners with children (especially those housed in the FIU), but participants experienced a more coordinated and intensive service, had more special visits from partners and children to undertake interventions as a family, were case managed ‘through the gate’ by a Family Integration Mentor (FIM), and were offered family support services for up to six months after release.

To be accepted as a beneficiary of IWW, prisoners had to have one or more children living in South Wales, 6–12 months left to serve, and an identified need for parenting or resettlement support. Priority was given to those whose partner (or person caring for their children) needed support in the community, and/or whose child(ren) had behavioural or emotional difficulties. It was not necessary for the whole family to have been living together before the father’s imprisonment, nor to plan to do so after release. Indeed, around half the parents were separated, and remained so following participation in the project: the focus was on improving the relationships between all the family members and the quality of all their lives, rather than trying to persuade them to live together.

The main elements of the IWW ‘model’ can be summarised as follows:

IWW was sometimes described by managers as consisting of three ‘hubs’: the ‘prison hub’ (delivering work with the father alone), the ‘transitional hub’ (delivering work with the father and family together during the custodial phase) and the ‘community hub’ (delivering work outside the prison), knitted together by the continuous, through-the-gate case management work of the FIMs. However, this is a somewhat misleading description of its organisational structure, as many staff worked in all three ‘hubs’. The main staff groups contributing to the project consisted of a core G4S team based in the FIU (but also working ‘through the gate’); a Barnardo’s team contracted to deliver parenting programmes and advice to prisoners, as well as support to partners/carers and children in the community; and a variety of other community based providers. The kinds of services delivered by these various staff groups are described in a little more detail below.

The core IWW project team, which had its offices in the FIU, was directly employed by G4S and managed on a day to day basis by the IWW Project Manager, with the assistance of a Business Support Officer who maintained a comprehensive set of records and casefiles. The operational members of the team, who undertook most of the individual work with prisoners, consisted of the four FIMs, a substance misuse worker, an Education/Training/Employment/Volunteering (ETEV) specialist, and a Family Support/Interventions Worker.

The FIU is very different to other wings in the prison. Each cell has access to a (monitored) telephone and television. Inspirational literature and wall art are evident on all three floors. The entire focus of the wing is upon enhancing family relationships and increasing parenting skills. This is manifested in a wide range of interventions, which cover issues around pregnancy, birth and baby care, family relationships, parenting skills, employment, training, education, social enterprise and other resettlement needs, as well as joint sessions with partners and/or children, aimed at cementing familial bonds. The latter are usually undertaken in the Family Interventions Lounge during extra visits outside normal visiting times. While IWW was funded by the Big Lottery, they were delivered by members of the core IWW team as well as other prison staff and sometimes external providers. Specific courses and activities offered to FIU residents included:

While all prisoners on the FIU had access to these interventions, IWW prisoners and their families could jointly attend some additional programmes developed by the project team (such as ‘Positive Relationships’, addressing relationship skills and domestic abuse, and ‘Past Present and Future’, addressing substance misuse). As noted earlier, they also received individual support from Barnardo’s and the other specialist project staff, and – most importantly – the ‘through the gate’ mentoring services provided by the FIMs.

The FIMs might be described as the glue which held the project together. They worked in a ‘whole family’ case management role with both fathers and family members, individually and together, inside and outside prison, before and after release. They had responsibility for planning and coordinating the work with each family, maintaining participants’ motivation and engagement with IWW, providing practical help and emotional support, and making referrals to other providers to meet particular needs where appropriate. As they had relatively small caseloads, they saw participants frequently and laid strong emphasis on developing close trusting relationships with each family, for whom they were the first point of contact when in need. They had between them a wide set of qualifications and skills, allowing them to help participants with a range of practical and emotional problems. They also liaised and exchanged information with the IWW partner organisations and with others who could assist the families, including probation officers, schoolteachers, and voluntary agencies. They received clinical case support and supervision from the Senior Social Worker appointed as a consultant to IWW.

The external partner agencies were sub-contracted to provide specific services, and line managed their own staff, rather than seconding them to G4S. The Barnardo’s team included a full-time advocacy/under 8’s worker (to provide one-to-one support sessions for younger children); a part-time Family Group Conferencing Co-ordinator (responsible for convening group conferences to help families communicate more effectively and promote the best interests of their children); and three Parenting Support Workers (to deliver Barnardo’s parenting programme). Among the other external providers commissioned by IWW, the YISP worker undertook one-to-one preventive work and advocacy support with children aged eight and over, and a community-based ETEV specialist (employed by Gwalia) provided education, training and employment support to ex-prisoners and family members.

The FIMs, Barnardo’s and other workers continued to provide support to each family for up to six months after the father’s release. A final ‘roll off’ meeting was held towards the end of this period to make exit from the project as comfortable as possible and to make referrals to other agencies if there was a strong need for continuing support.

Evaluation methodology

The research we conducted on IWW included both a process and an outcome evaluation. In this article we focus on the latter, in which we set out to assess the impact of IWW in relation to its three core aims: to improve the quality of family life of prisoners and their families; to reduce the likelihood that the prisoners would reoffend; and to reduce the likelihood of intergenerational offending. Clearly, these are difficult outcomes to measure conclusively, and most of the evidence obtained is inevitably indicative. As the number of families participating was fairly small (83), the methodology adopted was primarily qualitative, although some quantitative indicators of change were also obtained. The main sources of data are summarised below.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with fathers when they joined IWW, at the point of leaving prison and, as far as possible, in the community shortly before exiting the project; and with their partners (or guardians of their children) on joining IWW and during the post-release phase. ⁵ Focus groups were also held during half-term and summer holidays with children from IWW. These sources produced rich information about participants’ experiences of IWW and its impact on quality of life, well-being, social inclusion and family relationships.

Psychometric instruments were also used to produce indicative measures of change. These included:

Additional information about participants’ progress was obtained both through regular meetings with each FIM and through analysis of the comprehensive assessments and casefiles completed by IWW staff and held on the prison hub database. The latter included data from the IWW ‘outcome measurement tool’, designed by staff to score participants’ status before and after the father’s imprisonment in relation to accommodation; education, employment and training; health; drugs and alcohol; finance, benefit and debt; children and families; and attitudes, thinking and behaviour. A version of this was developed for use with children to reflect their well-being in terms of living arrangements, education, peer relationships, health, substance misuse, family life, engagement with services, and attitudes, thinking and behaviour. The tool was completed by the FIMs with all participants on joining and (as far as possible) on exiting IWW.

A comparison group of 76 prisoners not participating in IWW, but who matched the IWW eligibility criteria, was drawn from the main prisoner population at HMP Parc and interviewed once between twelve and six months prior to release, and a second time shortly before release. These interviews gathered qualitative data about non-IWW prisoners’ experience of family support services in HMP Parc. Most also completed Crime-Pics II questionnaires on both occasions, allowing comparisons of their scores with IWW participants. Re-offending rates of both groups will also be calculated when sufficient time has elapsed.

In addition, all IWW managers and staff, as well as members of partner organisations and children’s teachers, were interviewed at least once and in some cases two or three times. Finally, a short and informal email survey was conducted with a variety of people who had visited or been influenced by the project. These included politicians, policy-makers and prison governors in the UK and overseas. The aim of this survey was to gain a broad picture of the extent of the ‘ripples’ created by the IWW project, including its influence on criminal justice policy and the extent of any replication elsewhere.

Summary of findings

Three hundred and forty-nine beneficiaries from 83 families (83 prisoners, 94 adult family members and 172 children) participated in IWW. The majority of adult participants were aged between 21 and 35, and about two-thirds of the children were under eight. The prisoners generally had quite serious or prolific offending histories. Based on OGRS ⁶ scores, their average predicted risk of reoffending within 12 months of release was over 50%: this is considerably higher than the rate of re-offending across the prison estate for adult male prisoners serving 12 months or over, which for those released in 2014–15 stood at around 31% (Ministry of Justice 2017: Table C2a). Levels of need were also high across the board: Family Star scores averaged 40.5 across all adult participants, indicating high needs pre-custody in relation to parenting and family functioning. SDQ scores further indicated that over a quarter of children were at risk of, or already experiencing, clinical problems when they joined IWW.

In the following sections, we summarise our findings in relation to each of the three main aims of IWW, as outlined above. As its designers also hoped to influence policy and practice more widely, we add a brief account of the extent to which this has been achieved.