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We were invited to Brixton Prison to take part in a radio interview on how we can support parents who have a partner in prison
Imprisonment can damage family life, separating prisoners from their children and loved ones and making regular contact a challenge. Yet research suggests that having family ties can reduce the likelihood of reoffending by as much as 39%.
Families are a vital source of emotional, practical and financial support that help prisoners get through their sentences and make the changes necessary to turn their lives around.
The Prison Radio Association runs National Prison Radio (NPR) which is available to every prisoner in England and Wales - played directly into their cells. NPR promotes the importance of rebuilding or maintaining family relationships through its programmes. So, according to its producers, Home-Start was an ideal choice of charity to promote to its listeners.
In December 2011Home-Start was invited to Brixton Prison to take part in an interview about our work; to talk about how we support families and to reassure parents serving a prison sentence that there is help out there for their partners and children.
Home-Start was interviewed by an inmate who was first of all interested in how and why we were set up, what our volunteers did and how our confidential and non-judgmental help could provide a positive resource for prison families.
We spoke about the different types of problems that families were faced with and how Home-Start matches a volunteer to meet the needs of the family. We described the importance of increasing a parent’s ability to cope in a difficult situation, which leads to happier healthier parents, and in turn, happier, healthier children.
As more than 70 prisons across England and Wales will be able to hear the Home-Start interview, we spoke about the reach of the Home-Start network - across the UK and on British Forces Bases in Germany and Cyprus too.
We also spoke about the impact that practical and emotional support can have on a family struggling to deal with a partner serving a sentence. One difficulty that many prison families face is getting transport to take children on a prison visit. Many families have a partner who is imprisoned many miles from home or across the other side of the city where they live. Getting on and off buses with pushchairs and small children can be a daunting experience for families who are also having to cope with the emotional effect of going on a prison visit. We described how our volunteers can offer practical help with this – being an ‘extra pair of hands’ - making that prison visit so much easier.
At the same time, many parents returning from a visit experience feelings of isolation and loneliness, with some mums/dads saying that they actually feel like a single parent at home. Home-Start volunteers offer emotional support in situations like this, lending an ear, supporting and encouraging - just being there for the mum or dad if they want to offload to someone who won’t judge them for the situation the family is in.
In ending the interview we gave out our Home-Start contact details with Prison Radio encouraging their listeners to speak to their own families about getting some support from Home-Start, not to suffer in silence. We said that for many prison families who already had Home-Start support, it had made a world of difference to them at a very difficult point in their lives.
In responding to one of the final questions, “should all children be made to visit their parent in prison?”, we said that while it was not up to Home-Start to tell a parent that their children must or must not visit a parent in prison, we recognised that family relationships needed to be kept strong and that Home-Start will assist in trying to make that happen.
The Home-Start interview will be broadcast in December as an in depth feature piece as part of Prison Radio’s drive time show.
