Chris Holligan: Jail punishes children with pain of separation

The value of prison is open to debate, but the real victims are often those left on the outside, writes Chris Holligan

Across Europe some 800,000 children are separated from their parents by virtue of parental imprisonment. The number of women prisoners in Scotland, many of them mothers, has doubled in the recent decade. As the suicide statistics for Cornton Vale, Scotland’s only women’s prison, reveal these women must suffer intensely and the commission led by former Lord Advocate Elish Angiolini has ruled it is no longer fit for purpose. As the Scottish Government considers this report, it is worth remembering the effect prison has on the children of prisoners.

The loss of their mother usually means the children are taken into care as male partners rarely take over that parenting role. Being in care is a known risk factor for unemployment and later criminality.

Around 30,000 children in Scotland, according to Freedom of Information Act requests which I have had answered, alone suffer from having a parent, usually their father – and usually of working-class origins – incarcerated.

This is a shocking and disturbing statistic. The government has only recently woken up to it, but UK domestic law continues not to incorporate the UN Rights of the Child Charter and so these children’s right to nurture is not accepted as a mandatory factor which the judge is obliged to consider before sending someone to jail.

Sentencing is based on comparative justice, designed to hit the offender hard, but the “collateral damage” arising for the children makes this selectivity a fiction of jurisprudence. When we are made aware of the damaging effects of imprisonment this is usually to depict instances of serious injustice, such as the wrongful imprisonment.

That it tends to be extreme cases which “educate” us about the impact of loss of liberty serves to reinforce the deep social stigma associated with being a prisoner. I’m told that even relatives visiting inmates in Edinburgh’s prison try to avoid telling the taxi driver their true destination.

Research shows children are often lied to regarding their parents whereabouts. Children who do know the truth conceal it from school peers and teachers. Peers who do find out are known to bully the child of the jailed parent, which adds yet more damage to an already fragile self-esteem. Such effects, both short and longer-term, on the child’s life are notoriously damaging, and can be catastrophic.

Nell Bernstein in her book All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated describes many cases where the child witnesses the violence surrounding the arrest of a parent at home, often in the early hours of the morning, where the authorities sometimes make forced entry.

Children encountering these traumatic scenes in a place which is meant to be secure and precious are prone to developing a hatred for authority, especially of the police, whom they perceive as an enemy that used force to remove their father or mother. These invisible victims, of the criminal justice system, research reveals, experience nightmares as a result and often do less well at school, become aggressive more readily and are less resilient in the face of personal adversity.

Understandably we regard prisons as frightening institutions. It is not only the deprivation of liberty that conjures fear in us all, but also no doubt the enforced personal association with others whose behaviour and appearance provokes unease.

Indeed, their symbolic as well as physical appearance is functional, a reminder to others that if they transgress they will find themselves behind bars, living in a place where violence and aggression colours everyday life.

The prison environment has remained basically the same for centuries as barriers surround and prevent those inside getting outside. It is a profoundly unimaginative solution to the challenges presented to society by criminality. And yet millions are being invested in building new prisons and the prison population over the past decade has risen dramatically.

Research by the renowned psychologist John Bowlby explains the damage to children in terms of the disturbance to attachment bonds. Those intimate parent-child relations set the foundation for future wellbeing and happiness. It is easy to see how that severing of the roots of belonging through attachment contributes a loss of remorse and empathy. Inner restraints against anti-social actions, including offences involving hurting others, are undermined setting in train inter-generational cycles of families being afflicted with the effects of this criminal justice.

Unfortunately for our society a huge proportion of prisoners return to prison within 12 months. In that sense prisons “don’t work.” Rehabilitation is limited, and while dangerous people are taken out of society it is only for a while; they return to prison over their life-span and on a fairly regular basis. Some – remarkably – discover a more rewarding sense of community behind bars than they do on the outside, which is a sadly ironic reflection about our so-called law abiding communities.

Many prisoners do not commit violent crimes and arguably those parents ought to be given fewer custodial sentences, if any, especially if they are the parents of vulnerable children. Before things become even worse it is time to act upon the Report of the Children’s Commissioner for Scotland, Not Seen. Not Heard. Not Guilty published several years ago, but whose recommendations for sentencing and respecting the UN Charter on Rights of the Child remain largely neglected.

• Chris Holligan is professor of education in the faculty of health education and social science, University of the West of Scotland