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Meeting of the Parliament 15 March 2012

15 Mar 2012 · S4 · Meeting of the Parliament

Item of business

Offenders (Rehabilitation)

Fee, Mary Lab West Scotland Watch on SPTV

I thank the Liberal Democrats for bringing the issue to the chamber so that we can have a serious debate on how we address reoffending in Scotland. Reducing reoffending is a major issue in all countries throughout the world and there have many been many attempts to tackle it.

I will touch on the innocent victims of imprisonment: children. Children of prisoners are a very vulnerable group in society and the facts show that more children in Scotland experience a parent’s imprisonment than a parent’s divorce.

Ensuring that children have the rights that they are entitled to while a parent is in prison can be an effective tool in tackling reoffending among the parents. Brigadier Hugh Monro said that if good contact is maintained between prisoners and families, the risk of reoffending is dramatically lowered. Maintaining good contact between a child and their parent can be good for the child’s development as well as the level of recidivism among parents.

There are no definitive statistics on the number of children who have a parent in prison. However, in the UK alone, there are 17,000 children with mothers sent to prison each year; the total of incarcerated parents is estimated to be two and a half times the number of children in care and six times the number on the child protection register.

The time from the principal arrest of a parent to the court case and subsequent imprisonment can be traumatic for a child, who often does not understand what is happening in the judicial system. The effects are often many and varied, and each child is uniquely affected. Children can suffer a range of emotional, behavioural, educational and financial problems, many of which the average adult would be unable to cope with, and which lead to developmental problems and antisocial behaviour later in life. If such children are not supported, they are left standing outside the revolving door of reoffending, just as many parents are.

Prison visits by children are limited, for a number of reasons, and we need to encourage the use of family visits, but there are also opportunities for video and telephone calls. Those things do not, however, replace the relationship that a parent can have with her children or the relationship that children need if they are to grow and develop.

Before Christmas I had the pleasure of visiting HMP Perth, and was given a tour of the refurbished visiting centre and also the external visitors centre that provides support and advice to families who have a relative in jail. The external centre, which is run by CrossReach, provides emotional support and advice on benefits, health and care. External visitors centres are valuable, and they should be mandatory in Scotland, as they are in England. I commend the Government’s guarantee that all new prisons will have improved centres for family visits.

Yesterday was the most recent meeting of the cross-party group in the Scottish Parliament on families affected by imprisonment, which works closely with Families Outside. The speaker, Oliver Robertson from the Quaker United Nations Office, gave a fantastic update on the recent day of general discussion with the UN children’s rights committee. The day provided many recommendations for a set of international guidelines on how to handle children with incarcerated parents, with much focus on reoffending. A few examples of good practice were discussed, from countries that are less developed than Scotland. One example from Jamaica was the creation of PrisonBook, a heavily regulated form of Facebook, through which parents and children can have regular contact. In Poland, the police are given guidelines and protocols on how to handle children, and when they arrest a parent they take the child into a separate room. Those are just some of the examples of good practice that were discussed during the UN’s day of general discussion and then raised in the cross-party group.

While we are looking at our justice system and assessing reoffending in Scotland, we must also look at good practice internationally to keep people, especially parents, out of prison and away from a life of crime. If we keep parents out of prison, we have a better chance of keeping future generations out too.

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