Prisoners' Families and the Ripple Effects of Imprisonment

Jessica Breen

Issue 385, vol.97, Spring 2008

The woman may now end up enmeshed with different social agencies – in the guise of a ‘powerless agitator’ for various benefits. And if she taken on long hours of employment in order to ease the financial situation, the ripple effect is that she may alienate extended-family members : grandmothers do not take kindly to having extra baby-sitting foisted on them.

Such factors – known as the ‘collateral’ consequences of imprisonment – can leave prisoners’ families feeling as if they have been penalised for crimes they have not committed (and as if they are serving a parallel prison-sentence ‘on the outside’).

Negatively (as is to be expected) the enforced separation puts a strain on the emotional life of the couple. Positively, however, a good frequency of visits from partner and children functions as a huge emotional support to a prisoner. And if he feels that the family are behind him, the prospects for rehabilitation are good. But here again the whole logistical burden (of organising visits) falls on the woman : coordinating family members, transport, care packages, etc. Nor is this burden substantial only in situations like visits to political prisoners in England. The distance, for instance, of the Thornton Hall prison from Dublin’s centre is going to create its own problems. And, up to now, the manning of visitor centres at prisons has been left to voluntary organisations (e.g., Irish Prisoners’ Family InfoLine, The Bedford Row Project in Limerick, PACE).

Social stigma is another ‘sentence’ borne by those on the outside. Observes a former prisoner’s wife and prison chaplain : “Most people look at a woman who cares for a prisoner as somehow defective, if not in character then in self-esteem”. Parental stigmatisation has been identified as one of the ways in which prisoners’ children are socially excluded – and can lead to children taking on a deviant self-identification. One Cambridge study found that separation due to parental imprisonment during the first ten years of life, predicted all the antisocial-delinquent outcomes for boys (over and above similar separations, or other individual risk factors)…a ripple effect down the generations. A survey in Mountjoy Prison found that 15% of prisoners had a father who had been in prison and that 44% had a sibling who had been in prison.

Jessica Breen is a PhD Candidate in the School of Social Work and Social Policy, Trinity College Dublin.