Spatial Distance

7.2.1.1 Spatially Separated (by prison)

This is the most common experience within familial imprisonment literature. It describes the experience of families who were previously living together, or had close relationships, but for whom prison has created physical distance and separation between members, where one is within prison but the rest of the family are not. The physical separation, along with the rules and regulations that come with prison life, change how young people can communicate with their imprisoned family members.

For children and younger teenagers, the decision to keep in touch can be taken out of their hands. This can be because they have not been told where their family member is, but even when they do know they are in prison they are still reliant on others, particularly for visits (when aged under 16 visitors must attend with an adult). Control can also be taken out of their hands if, as was true for one participant, their family member is in prison overseas which reduces the ability to visit or receive phone calls. While this may account for only a small number of young people who have a family member in prison, it should be noted that not all will be able to use the communication methods provided, such as phone calls and visiting, in order to try and maintain a relationship during a sentence of imprisonment.

Elements of this changing communication have been covered elsewhere in the thesis: Section 5.2.1.4 explores the restrictions and provisions around telephone calls and visits specifically in respect of young people’s experiences, Section 5.2.2.1 looks at sibling experiences of visiting and Section 7.3.1 below explores

the use of letters as a form of communication. Here though, I focus on the prison visit as an example of this.

Prison Visits

Visiting a family member in prison is a very specific way of spending time together as a family and sustaining a relationship through a sentence. It can also be a very different form of face-to-face contact than the kind which takes place outside of a prison. Moran (2013) described prison visit rooms as “liminal carceral spaces” where prison visitors cross a threshold and are temporarily absorbed into the prison and made subject to its rules and regulations before crossing over again, back into the outside world (Comfort, 2008; Foster, 2017).

For young people, they can experience a double liminality within this space;

they are not catered for as a young child nor as an adult and are simultaneously not a prisoner but not free either.

As noted above, not all of the young people I spoke to had visited their family members in prison but for those that had, it was generally something which came with elements of negativity around the practicalities of this: the waiting about; the “horrible” process of getting in; the fact their family member

“couldn’t stand up” and move about; the “awkward” set up of the table and chairs in the visit room; and the “unnatural” and “forced” conversations (Morven, Natalia, Kev, all KIN).

Morven spoke about the difficulties of interacting with your family member when you were only there for an hour so could not be your “normal family self”.

Instead she had to have the same “typical prison chat” about school or what she’d been up to each week, trying not to talk too much about “the outside world” that the person within prison was missing out on. These types of conversations, and the language or questions used when communicating with someone in prison is explored in more detail in Section 7.4.1 below in respect of the emotional distance it can introduce into relationships. It is conversely discussed, however, in Section 7.4.2.2 in respect of the experiences of young people who themselves have also served a period of imprisonment. Here these conversations can represent a shared language or understanding between the young person and their currently or previously imprisoned family member.

The lack of diverse conversation however, may explain Darren’s response when I asked him whether visits were a big thing, being such a limited time to spend with someone:

“Sometimes, no, hauf, hauf the time you forget, you run out of stuff tae say, know what I mean, it ends up being pure boring.”

Sometimes arguments can be made that to improve the experience for families of prisoners there just needs to be more or longer visits, and while this is what some of my participants wanted, it can be an over simplistic view where we think only about quantity and not also the quality of contact. This is something which is reflected in Kotova’s (2018) research with partners of long-term prisoners and also in Beckmeyer and Arditti’s (2014) research on parent-child relationships, though from the parent’s point of view. Their quantitative research shows that the frequency of visits was unrelated to the quality of the imprisoned parent-child relationship (the parents were all fathers) and instead a lack of closeness in the relationship was associated with the problems encountered during visits.

Morven also summed up the idea that prison visits to her brother were not the same as how she would have spent time with her family before:

“I think if they did research before that maybe there would be more things in place for people, like, just to actually have a family gathering instead of a prison visit.” (emphasis added)

This idea that prison visits are not how family was done outside of prison was reflected on by other participants.

Liam talked about visiting his dad when he was younger:

“But it was a, mibbe, it was a different experience because obviously when you go and see somebody outside you’re sitting in a hoose or anything like that but when I go up there you’re getting searched before you go in, you’re, everything’s taken off you, your phone’s in the locker, keys are in the lockers, everything like that. And then when you go upstairs you’re no allowed to touch them, you’re no, you just need to sit

in front of them. So it was quite different for me. So I wanted to go and go over and gie him a cuddle but my mum said to me obviously I would’ve got chucked oot the visit if I did, so-,”

He also talked about visiting his brother and how this was different to how he would normally spend time with him. He spoke about the fact that if there were a lot of people in the house they would go and sit somewhere else, so in the back garden rather than the living room or go and play football or the computer or something together, just them. So, visiting in the visit room was totally different because there was always lots of other people there.

Chris also found visits different to spending time together with family members at home, though experienced the busyness of a visit room differently to Liam.

He spoke about being in prison himself and being visited and actually saw the visit as providing an element of peace and quiet and time to spend “alone” with someone, even though the room would be full of other people.

Scott spoke about the difference between visiting and normal interactions with his brother outside of a prison, both in terms of the way they had to sit and interact as well as the fact that there is always someone there watching you:

“You just have to sit, like, with your hands out and just, like, speak, you can’t put your hands under the table, you can’t put your hands in your pocket, you’ve gotta keep your hands on the table […] You’ve just gotta sit there like that and just speak to each other directly […] ‘Cause you’ve got, you’ve got, like, five, five people watching you, five officers watching you, and they’re knowing what you’re saying and looking at you, and it’s, like, it’s just weird.”

While we can consider the need to attend prison visits as a result of the spatial distance introduced into relationships through a period of imprisonment, we must also consider the specific spatial aspects of the places in which these visits take place. While children’s visits are different, allowing the person in prison to get up, move around and interact with their visitors, this is not true of the standard visit, which represented most of the young people’s experiences. Here,

movement is restricted and much of the visit is spent sitting on a seat fixed to the floor on the opposite site of a low table (to limit the chance of anything being passed beneath it) from your family member. The provisions and behaviour allowed within the visit room therefore constructs this contact as a risk to the prison, despite the family’s construction as an asset in the desistance process.

Even where the family member does have the freedom to get up and move about, the further restrictions imposed on the interaction by the space can still impact on the levels of intimacy achievable through their interactions.

Intimacy has been defined as being “concerned with everyday relationships and affective interactions” (Gabb, 2008: 2) and is one aspect of the family practices spoken about in Chapter 2 (Morgan, 2011). Morgan set out three different dimensions of intimacy – embodied, emotional and intimate knowledge – all of which can be affected by the restrictions on where and how these family practices can be carried out when someone is in prison. While ideas of intimacy within families were originally based around sexuality, and therefore focused on partners, while this can still be the case, it has also been extended out to apply to parent/child (Jamieson, 1998; Gabb, 2008) and sibling relationships (Edwards et al., 2006). It is therefore a relevant concept when exploring young people’s relationships with their family members carried out within a prison setting. For example, Morven speaking in Chapter 5 about being unable to “mess about” with her brother as they did at home, Liam talking above about the lack of physical contact allowed with his dad in visits, and Natalia in Chapter 5 speaking about the difficulties of having a conversation with her dad in the midst of all the noise when children are playing at the visits. The idea of the quality of time in visits above is linked to the concept of intimacy through the quality of time spent together as a family (Gabb, 2008). Where intimacy is important in family life generally this means that it is also an important concept within the prison visit rooms that this family life is now having to be carried out within. The examples above indicate how the visit room can inhibit this achievement of intimacy between the young people and their family members and Oldrup (2018) questions whether it is even possible to feel levels of family-connectedness within a prison visit room. This is particularly interesting given that her study was based in Denmark, where the penal system is notably recognised as more humane than that within the UK.

Moran and Disney (2018) have also explored elements of intimacy within the visit room, using the idea of comfort as experienced through the layout and furniture within the space. Though their research mainly focused on partners, young people will also experience the chairs fixed to the floor on either side of the table. They are therefore faced with a choice: to sit more comfortably in the seat but be further away from their family member, or to sit on the edge of the seat and lean forward, decreasing the physical distance but potentially increasing the level of discomfort. Particularly where we focus on the ability to share a close family moment within the midst of a busy, and often noisy, visit room the necessity to lean in can be understood further (Moran and Disney, 2018). When this is combined with the constant feeling of being watched, as Scott spoke about above, this reduces the opportunity to have these close relationships and moments of shared intimacy within these spaces. Therefore, while visits may, in some ways, bring the young person and their family member together in the same room there can still be a physical and emotional distance between them, enforced by the layout of the room they are within.

7.2.1.2 Spatially Separated (within the prison estate)

Spatial separation can result where both family members are serving a sentence at the same time, though in different prisons. This can compound the levels of restrictions and difficulties in communicating and maintaining those relationships where only one member is in prison. Where Sykes (1958) noted in his pains of imprisonment thesis that those who were incarcerated experience deprivation of liberty (e.g. being cut off from family) as well as the deprivation of autonomy (e.g. a loss of control over when and how to contact these family members), these pains can be doubled up when both a young person and their parent or sibling is in prison. Where the family member is outside of the prison, they can at least retain some, although admittedly limited, control over these communications. Times can be arranged to make calls during recreation (though availability of the telephone will depend on whether these can actually take place) and visits can be arranged each week during a choice of, again limited, time slots. Where the calls or visits take place across the prison estate however, these are completely at the mercy of arrangements by staff.

For the young people I spoke to within the YOI, three had male parents (dads or step-dads) and one an older brother, who were within an adult prison while they were within the YOI. One of these young people would still have been classed as a child in respect of prison visits (i.e. under the age of 18).

It is possible to have inter-prison telephone calls which have to be arranged through staff and take place over office telephones at a specifically arranged time between the prisons, rather than through the telephones on the hall. While there were advantages to this arrangement (there was no cost for the prisoner associated with these calls) it removed the already severely restricted control from them over when calls can take place. There was no consensus among the young people on the number and regularity of these telephone calls that they were allowed. One young person spoke of the fact that they could call their family member once every two weeks:

“…you get a phone call, well you can put in for one every two week but sometimes when you put in for one you don’t get it […] You don’t always, no, ‘cause sometimes, like, they can, they can say, you’ve had it too much and that, know what I mean, you only get it, it’s like once every fortnight. Sometimes, like, the way it works you don’t get it for, like, every three week and that. So it’s, it is quite, quite annoying ‘cause it’s only, like, every three week, know what I mean, and writing letters, it’s no the same.” (Darren)

Ryan was aware of the fact he could have inter-prison calls but had not yet had any. Grant was also aware of the possibility of these calls but was unsure if he would be able to have them with his step-dad as these were already due to take place with his step-dad’s biological son, and he did not know if it was possible for someone in prison to use these types of call for two different relatives. Scott was also aware of, and had received these calls with his brother, but was unaware of any regularity with which they were allowed. He spoke of having had one call three months ago and had another arranged when I spoke to him. He talked about having to work out how often to ask to phone his brother as if he asked for too many people might get suspicious. He also said that he had not been made aware of these calls when he came into the YOI but instead said that

his mother had mentioned the possibility of him getting them and when he had asked staff they had then been arranged.

Only one of the participants had had inter-prison visits. One other was aware of them but had not had any, and though another may have been eligible for them he did not seem to know anything about them. Darren explained that you could get one 90-minute inter-prison visit every six months and that to be eligible for these you both needed to be serving longer than six months and have more than six months left on your sentence. Where one family member is in a YOI and one in an adult prison then the adult will always come to the YOI. His experience of these visits was not particularly positive. His dad had to be brought to the YOI three times before they were able to get the full hour-and-a-half they were allowed, and these three visits were the only ones he had had in 12 months.

Again, the lack of control around visits generally is compounded where both the young person and their family member is in prison. It is important to consider this relative to contact prior to the imprisonment. Darren spoke of seeing his dad most days, and living close to him, when they were both out of prison. Even when his dad had previously been serving a sentence he would visit him twice a week so this was significantly less contact than he was used to having with his dad.