15.6 No one has day-to-day responsibility within prisons for ensuring that links between prisoners and families are maintained. Consequently, families are not involved in the process of rehabilitation, there is no one person the family can contact for information, and there is generally no one they can pass on concerns to about the prisoner’s welfare or mental health.
15.7 Lack of information for prisoners’ families is a recurrent complaint. Visits are seen as a particular problem. Some families only find out that a prisoner’s visit entitlement has changed, or even that they have been transferred to another prison, on arrival for a visit.
55 per cent of male prisoners describe themselves as living with a partner before imprisonment.248
35 per cent of women prisoners describe themselves as living with a husband or partner before
imprisonment, and 66 per cent say they have dependent children under 18 (40 per cent under 10).249
Around 125,000 children are affected by the imprisonment of a parent each year.250
25 per cent of young offenders are fathers, while 39 per cent of female young offenders are
mothers.251
43 per cent of sentenced prisoners and 48 per cent of remand prisoners say they have lost
contact with their families since entering prison.252
22 per cent of the prisoners who were married on entering prison are now divorced or separated.253
In 2001 prisoners were held an average of 53 miles away from home.254
Sentence planning
15.8 Prisoners’ families are rarely involved in the process of sentence planning . Yet over a third of prisoners say they would welcome their family’s involvement.255Others have argued that,
where appropriate, families’ involvement in this process would help to make prisoners more honest in their assessment of the progress they were making in tackling their offending behaviour.
Visiting
15.9 Prisoners can keep in touch with their families through letters and telephone calls. However, as noted in , many prisoners have low basic skills levels, making written correspondence difficult. Access to telephones is limited and usually dependent on earning enough to purchase phonecards, which are expensive relative to prisoners’ earnings. Visits are therefore a very important means of prisoners and their families maintaining contact.
15.10 Since the Woolf Report,256convicted prisoners have been entitled to one visit per fortnight,
although prisoners on ‘enhanced status’ will be entitled to more. Unconvicted prisoners are entitled to at least three visits per week. Prisoners are usually allowed up to three people per visit.
15.11 Although no central record is kept, evidence points to a decline in the overall number of prison visits during a time when the prison population has been increasing. For instance, claims for financial assistance with prison visits have dropped by over 10 per cent between 1999 and 2000.257
15.12 Research has also found that only about two-thirds of prisoners in local prisons and just over
half of those in training prisons received the minimum statutory entitlement of two visits per
month.258One of the main reasons behind this may be the long distances that many prisoners are
kept from home.259This can be particularly difficult for those families relying on public transport
as prisons are often located in remote areas not served by transport routes.260Although there is an
absence of up-to-date figures, research has shown that almost a quarter of prisoners’ families faced a round trip of at least five hours.261The SEU was told of two London-based mothers, who
were wheelchair users, whose sons were in Portland, Dorset. For those who do not receive financial assistance the cost of visiting can be prohibitive.
15.13 Other possible reasons for the seeming reduction in the overall number of visits could be the
arrangements in place for visits. There is no Prison Service standard for the conditions and facilities in which visits are conducted and conditions vary widely, with the result that they can be far from ‘user-friendly’:
● some visiting halls are unpleasant and frightening, particularly for children;
● time slots for visits are usually pre-scheduled and inflexible. They are nearly always during the
daytime, which requires adults to take time off work and children to miss a day of school;
● the necessity of booking ahead can mean that prisoners are unable to receive visits in the
first weeks of their sentence, which is when they are most at risk of depression and suicide;
● many families have difficulty getting through to the prison to book a visit. In one case, the SEU
was told of a women’s prison where a reduction in the staff available to take bookings resulted in a reduction in successful requests. In response, the prison cut visiting hours;
● procedures for booking and visiting vary widely from prison to prison and information can be
hard to come by;
Chapter 7
Chapter 6
● visiting can take a whole day, and partners with children either have to find childcare or bring
their children with them. Although crèche and other visitor facilities have improved in some prisons, not least through effective partnerships with the voluntary sector, there are still lots of prisons where families have to wait in the rain outside the gate;
● the attitude of staff conducting visits at prisons has often been criticised as being
unsympathetic and characterised mainly by suspicion. Prison officers, even those working in visitor halls, receive no training in dealing sensitively with the needs and concerns of families; and
● although drug prevention measures are very important, some have criticised them as being
unnecessarily intrusive. There has been much criticism of the manner in which drug searches are conducted, and surveillance of visits is often felt to remove them of all privacy.262Many
prisons are trying to address this by a more intensive use of surveillance cameras, although CCTV alone is insufficient to prevent all drug smuggling.