Tomorrow we go to the polls and it’s likely that by the time many of you read this we will have a Labour government.
A Labour government whose manifesto says this:
“Children who have experienced parental imprisonment are at increased risk of mental illness, poor educational outcomes and unemployment. We will ensure that these young people are offered support when they ask for it, to enable them to thrive.”
Oh hang on. My mistake. It didn’t say that.
It says this:
The children of those who are imprisoned are at far greater risk of being drawn into crime than their peers. We will ensure that those young people are identified and offered support to break the cycle.
It labels children who experience parental imprisonment as people who need to be identified so that measures can be put in place to prevent them reaching their criminal potential.
Really?
Defining children whose parents are imprisoned in terms of their criminal potential is discriminatory and harmful and breaches their right to be protected by the state from discrimination which they face on the basis of the status or activities of their parents (see Article 2 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child). A manifesto pledge which asserts that the reason to support children who experience parental imprisonment is because they are on a path to becoming criminally active, is, I would suggest, irresponsible, discriminatory and definitely not in the best interests of the child.
It must be true, I heard it in the Commons
‘But’, you say, ‘Isn’t it true that 65% of boys with a parent in prison will go on to commit criminal offences? MPs say it, charities use the figure, local authority safeguarding resources mention it too.’
I’ve been unsettled by the increasingly widespread use of that figure and the fact that no one who uses it ever says where it comes from. I wondered if it was the kind of mythical statistic that is believed because of its familiarity rather than its veracity. When I was writing up my PhD there was an oft quoted stat for mothers in prison which cited ‘Liebling and Maruna’ but I couldn’t find the information anywhere. Eventually I wrote to the authors, assuming I’d missed something and was told they hadn’t ever said what everyone attributed to them. I didn’t know where to start looking for the 65% as no source is ever cited.
Feeling like a researcher on the Radio 4 programme ‘More or Less’ I began with the research papers both in the UK and internationally, which have tried to assess whether there is a link between parental imprisonment and children’s criminal offending, and papers which are systematic reviews of the data. To summarise, these studies show that children who have experienced parental imprisonment are more at risk of mental illness, poor educational outcomes, unemployment and being involved in the criminal justice system. However, these studies have not yet proved a causal link between parental imprisonment and children’s criminal justice involvement. The data has been insufficient to control for other factors and isolate parental imprisonment as the cause of the increase. Even when an increased likelihood of criminal justice contact is present, there is significant variation, and no studies are anywhere close to the 65% figure.
So where does the figure come from?
‘The Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development’ was a longitudinal study which collected data about 411 boys born in 1953. They are now men aged 71.
24 of those boys experienced the imprisonment of their father before the age of 18, so no later than 1971.
15 of them (65%) committed a criminal offence between the ages of 19 and 32.
That’s the 65%……
Shocking really, that the experience of 15 boys in the 1960s and 1970s is used as a basis for proposing policy affecting approximately 200,000 children in 2024*.
In 2008 the academics who reported the 65% figure urged caution. They said the research was limited due to the small number of boys in the study.
‘imprisoning parents might harm children and contribute to the intergenerational transmission of offending. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that children should be protected from any form of discrimination or punishment based on their parents’ status or activities (Article 2)… parental imprisonment differs from many classic risk factors in criminology because it is determined not only by individuals’ behaviour but also, critically, by state actions. It is important to prevent harmful effects of state actions on children.
(Murray and Farrington, 2008)
Quite.
And yet here we are with the state taking an approach which is discriminatory and may cause harm.
Given that it is not clear what the causal link may be between parental imprisonment and children’s future criminality, it is hard to imagine what support is going to be offered to ‘break the cycle’. Children who have experience of parental imprisonment may need all kinds of support, but they will not all need the same support, and some won’t need any at all. The offer of support would be better framed as ‘whatever support they need to thrive’ in much the same terms as is offered to children under section 17 of the Children Act 1989. Under that legislation the local authority have a duty to promote the welfare of children who are in need by providing appropriate services, having ascertained the child’s wishes and feelings and given due consideration to them.
I’m also concerned about what compulsory identification will lead to and what it signifies for the children it purports to support. Developing a system of automatic identification based on concerns around ‘intergenerational offending’ will inevitably lead to a relationship of surveillance between the state and children with a parent in prison. Dr Lauren Wroe has written about this here in the context of extra-familial harm and social work.
I’ve long argued for data collection to allow proper provision to be put in place for children whose parents are imprisoned, but I’ve argued for that to be anonymised rather than identifying data. Until the numbers of affected children are known, and the budgets are allocated across health, education, local authorities, housing, for those children and the adults supporting them, what is the purpose in identifying the children, if not to stigmatise them further?
The proposal in the manifesto fails to reckon with the inherently disempowering nature of the criminal justice system. Children who have been invisibilised in the processes of arrest and the courts, will then have their agency removed from them when statutory identification takes place. What if they don’t want to be identified? Who is listening to their voice? People are imprisoned for all kinds of different crimes and life events, and to treat all children identically in that situation cannot be right.
There is no doubt that support should be made available, but I would urge the (likely) Labour government to heed the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, Concluding Observations on the periodic reports of the UK in 2023;
[the Committee] 20 ‘Urges the State(a) to implement targeted policies and programmes to … eliminate discrimination against children in disadvantaged situations, including … children of incarcerated parents.’
In section 20(c) it proposes ‘media campaigns to change social norms and behaviours that contribute to discrimination.’
In section 20(d) it states that the UK should ‘take legislative and other measures to ensure the protection of all children below 18 years of age to … address discriminatory stereotypes against children and promote a positive image of children as rights holders.’
With a nod to the football tournament that is running concurrently with the election campaigning, I’d suggest the Labour party are scoring an own goal here. Their two sentences on children with imprisoned parents embed discriminatory stereotypes and contribute to discrimination.
I echo the words of Associate Professor Catherine Flynn of Monash University, Australia, who authored one of the reviews:
‘the author is not denying that the children of imprisoned parents may be at higher risk of offending or imprisonment… It is simply that the extent of this risk is ill established, and understanding the particular circumstances of these children is not served by conjecture and poor science; nor are their futures well served by being labelled as criminals-in-waiting. This discussion should also serve as a cautionary tale about reliance on statistical rumours, which when ‘out there’ become truths. The research does, however, point to the circumstances in which children find themselves. To understand and intervene more judiciously, we would do better to focus our concern on the immediate and well documented problems experienced by these children, rather on their potential for causing problems in the future.’
Of course there should be more provision to support children who experience the imprisonment of a parent. But it’s time to move beyond a one dimensional approach focused on future criminality.
As they keep telling us, it’s time for change.
Further Reading:
Besemer, S., Farrington, D.P. and Bijleveld, C.C. (2013) Official bias in intergenerational transmission of criminal behaviour. British Journal of Criminology, 53(3), pp.438-455.
Besemer,S., Ahmad, S.I., Hinshaw,S.P., Farrington, D.P, (2017) A systematic review and meta-analysis of the intergenerational transmission of criminal behavior, Aggression and Violent Behavior, Volume 37, Pages 161-178
Conway, J.M., Jones, E.T. (2015). ‘Seven out of Ten? Not even close : A review of research on the likelihood of children with incarcerated parents becoming justice-involved’ Central Connecticut State University .
Flynn, C. (2013) Understanding the risk of offending for the children of imprisoned parents: A review of the evidence, Children and Youth Services Review, vol 35(2) pp 213-217
Flynn, C., Van Dyke, N., & Gelb, K. (2017). Intergenerational offending: The case for exploring resistance. Probation Journal, 64(2), 146-154. https://doi.org/10.1177/0264550517701200
Jahanshahi, B., McVie, S., & Murray, K. (2023). Like mother, like child? Sex differences in the maternal transmission of offending among a Scottish cohort of pre-adolescent children. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 23(3), 330-347. https://doi.org/10.1177/17488958211056177
Murray, J., Farrington, D.P. (2008) The effects of parental imprisonment on children. In M.Tonry (Ed.) Crime and Justice: A review of research (vol.37, pp.133-206). Chicago, Il: University of Chicago Press
* 65% is not in the manifesto, but was mentioned in parliament on Tuesday 21st May 2024.
Dr Shona Minson 