Father Time

The key to reducing recidivism is to focus on relationships, says Raje Ballagan-Evans.

When we think of a man in prison, ‘father’ is unlikely to come to mind. However, 54 per cent of people in prison in the UK are parents. Combining incarceration, which causes isolation and stigma, with disproportionately high rates of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), inevitably impacts the mental health of men in prison and presents them with multiple barriers to family contact.  

Data backs our understanding of the impact of loss of contact between men in prison and their children – fathers feel a sense of loss, disempowerment and the effects on their identity perception, while children can experience mental health issues, anxiety and behavioural problems that carry into adulthood.

The significance for a child of having their primary caregiver suddenly removed, together with the income they provide, is emotional and developmental trauma that must be addressed. While state and community sup­p­ort is vital, it cannot replace the relationship a child has with their parent. Programmes and initiatives that support parents to maintain family contact while serving their custodial sentences address this crucial restorative process.

Specifically, the role of the father enables children to develop coping skills, emotionally regulate, and engage socially – including with the education system. Father engagement fosters exploration, resilience and cognitive growth, but for parents who’ve missed the vital safety and support in their own formative years, which would have enhanced their self-perception, foundational work on their own identity must be the starting point.  

The challenges of supporting men in prison to address these barriers are complex, but there’s potential for the empowerment of the individual and their ability to connect well with themselves and others. The ‘theory of change’ model mentions identity, relationship and community, and this pathway begins by working with people to help them understand and value their personal and cultural identity.

Values-based living offers a strong lens through which individuals can choose why and how they connect with people, developing bonds and trust. These relationships can drive confidence and a desire to connect socially, helping to create a community to protect and nurture themselves and their family.

This model has proved to be helpful and empowering for fathers who are in prison. SIG’s Fathers Inside programme uses arts-based therapies and in-person workshops to apply the theory of change as an enabling and rehabilitating tool – the most recent evaluation of it (Blagden 2019) highlighted a statistically significant reduction in parental stress pre/post programme and a significant increase in less restrictive attitudes towards parenting because of it. 

While Dr Bessel Van der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score popularised the scientific evidence around arts-based therapies and rehabilitation, public stigma still surrounds its use within the criminal justice system, which retains primarily punitive approaches to rehabilitation. Surely with prison places maxed out, we need investment in identity-based programmes that support people to make best-interest decisions for themselves and their families – instead of demanding change from people under the guise of social norms that they have never experienced or benefited from.  

Ministry of Justice analysis of Fathers Inside also demonstrated that programme participants had a reoffending rate of 24 per cent compared to 40 per cent among those who did not participate. A month after completing it, 76.5 per cent of participants engaged in further education, training and employment, compared to 53.6 per cent before the programme.

So what does the data from Fathers Inside show us? That relationship and citizenship are indeed good outcomes, but they require an individual sense of identity and positive self-esteem to become attainable and sustainable for people in prison. In his influential review linking family ties and reduced recidivism (2017), Lord Farmer stated: ‘I do want to hammer home a very simple principle of reform that needs to be a golden thread running through the prison system and the agencies that surround it. That principle is that relationships are fundamentally important if people are to change’.

This change is needed for those in contact with the criminal justice system, their families and the communities in which they live. Embedding rehabilitative programmes, facilitating family contact through trained staff and appropriate prison facilities – technological and environmental – must be the norm in each prison so that men leave prison and stay out. 

The preventive impact on families and in particular, children, should be a national policy focus. Lord Farmer’s review recommended this in the form of a family strategy being mandated in every prison, which would be a key to unlocking the prison crisis.

Raje Ballagan-Evans is policy and impact manager at the Social Interest Group (SIG)