Prisoners’ families are heavily reliant on services provided by third sector and voluntary organisations, including the Prisoner Advice and Care Trust (PACT), Partners of Prisoners (POPS), Barnardo’s and Children Heard and Seen. Providing virtual support, the ‘Prisoners’ Families Helpline’ is an effective free phone service funded by the government but managed by the voluntary sector to provide information and guidance to the family members of prisoners (Codd, 2007; Sharratt, 2014). The positive developments that emerged following Lord Farmer’s (2017, 2019) landmark reviews are welcomed, for instance, through increased accountability and pressure on prisons to produce and publish ‘Family and Significant Other Strategies’ for the National Information Centre for Children of Offenders (NICCO5). Arguably, the traction that has accompanied Lord Farmer’s reports from policy to practice has increased awareness and prominence of family work in some prisons. However, the Assisted Prison Visits Scheme (APVS) is the only statutory, economic resource for low-income family members seeking financial support to engage in prison visits. It is not clear how widely this resource is used by families, including the caregiving kin of the children of female prisoners. Moreover, sustained and adequate funding for charities (Codd, 2008; NPC [New Philanthropy Capital], 2011), alongside cuts to public sector funding (Ricketts, 2018), create a ‘postcode lottery’ (Raikes, 2016) of support for families and bring about serious challenges for the voluntary sector to continue bearing responsibility for the needs of those with a loved one in prison.
One reason that the families of prisoners are systemically disregarded and under-supported in policy and practice links to negative depictions of this social group derived from erroneous and discriminatory social perceptions of prisons and prisoners. Prison remains hidden in society (King and Wincup, 2000; Martin, 2000) and so it is difficult for many people to grasp its unique essence.6 Linked to this, people in the general population often draw on media representations to gain some insight into prisons and prison life, though these are dramatised and present inaccurate images of the realities of crime and punishment (Sparks, 1992; Mason, 2007; Marsh, 2009). The lack of social verification for families experiencing imprisonment may therefore occur as prison is not viewed as a familial ‘loss’ that is socially significant (Arditti, 2016) or worthy of attention and support. Their proximity and relationship to the prisoner – as someone who is a devalued individual in society by virtue of their crime (Goffman, 1963) – results in a diminished social status for the families. From her research with the family members of serious offenders, Condry (2007b) found that ‘kin contamination’ and ‘kin culpability’ were widely experienced in these families. ‘Kin contamination’, attuned to Goffman’s (1963) ‘courtesy stigma’ theory, found that the family’s relationship to the stigmatised individual caused their status to be similarly devalued. Meanwhile, ‘kin culpability’ refers to the application of blame to families for their failure to successfully function and produce citizens to the expectations of society. Put another way, kin culpability might be better known as family blaming.
It is unclear how occupying this vulnerable and largely under-supported social position – conceptualised in this book as a ‘disenfranchised social status’ – affects the lives and experiences of family members responsible for children whose mothers have been removed into prison by the state. This is problematic against the current backdrop of policy rhetoric that has seemingly advocated support for prisoners’ family ties in recent years (SEU, 2002; Home Office, 2004; MoJ and HMPPS, 2019a). Of critical concern is that this knowledge gap may undermine recent policies supposedly directed towards prisoners’ families and children as without a clear picture of the issues, policies run the risk of failing to respond adequately to the needs and often disadvantaged circumstances of these forgotten family members.
Relatedly, readers are asked to keep in mind that the discussions about family members and children reveal the challenging experiences of people who have themselves committed no infractions; they have not been accused or convicted of breaking any law. From many standpoints – legal, ethical, logical, humanitarian and economic – these relatives ought not to be punished as a result of the mother’s conviction, though realistically they are. Thus, to try to account for the nature, scope and ways in which this custodial sentence – as a penal punishment aimed, legally, at the mother – spills over into the lives and experiences of caregivers and the wider family, the concept of the ‘family sentence’ is also developed and woven throughout this book.
Chapter overview
Chapter Two outlines the methodology used in this book, including the theoretical framework and methods selected. Importantly, this chapter also introduces each of the 15 families who participated in this study to ensure that the reader is well acquainted with their lives and experiences. Chapters Three, Four, Five and Six present the accounts of caregiving relatives looking after the children of women in prisons serving England and Wales. Chapter Three examines family constructions and caregiving practices within families, paying close attention to the relationships within families and social networks. Chapter Four looks at the different ways in which caregivers had to renegotiate their lives in the aftermath of the mother’s sentence, both in the short and long term. Chapter Five focuses on the caregiver’s experience of navigating the criminal justice system, and Chapter Six explores the caregiver’s social status, including experiences of stigma.
Tying together the empirical findings, Chapter Seven reviews the key themes that underpin the research and that have emerged from listening to the caregiving kin: the ‘family sentence’ and the caregiver’s ‘disenfranchised social status’. In looking to the future and listening to families, these nuanced insights are used to inform recommendations to improve policy and practice. Finally, Chapter Eight is a reflective chapter that seeks to shed light on the experience of ‘doing’ the research.
Summary
Many of the issues traditionally associated with maternal imprisonment focus on the adversities and challenges facing mothers and children. This chapter has shown why there is also a need to understand the demands placed on the wider family – and especially caregiving relatives – during this time. Failing to do this ignores the social, penal and familial costs of separating thousands of family members every year. It could also perpetuate one-dimensional images of maternal imprisonment in the criminal