Children should be able to see their mothers in prison

Work with Offenders reviews a new report from MPs

Members of Parliament have added their voice to that of penal reform groups who have been calling for some time for the government to change its approach to coronavirus in prisons. The influential Joint Committee on Human Rights has just published a new report formally titled: “the Government’s response to COVID-19: children whose mothers are in prison”, which finds that the right to family life of children whose mothers are in prison risks being breached, and proposes that the Government ends the ban on children visiting and considers the temporary release from prison of every low risk mother of dependent children, alongside pregnant women and women in Mother and Baby Units.

The Committee has become increasingly concerned about the right to family life of children whose mothers are in prison. Last year they published a report found that urgent reforms were needed to ensure that children, whose mothers were in prison, had their right to a family life, upheld and protected. The Committee insisted that when sentencing a mother who has dependent children, judges must make every effort to understand the potential impact of a custodial sentence on those children, and the child’s right to respect for family life should be upheld and every possible and practicable step taken to ensure that they are able to maintain positive relationships with their mothers. The Committee recommended that when sentencing, the judge must make reasonable enquiries to establish whether the mother has a dependent child and take this into account appropriately.

Of course the outbreak of Covid-19 has exacerbated problems of the separation of children from mothers in prison. Banning visits and the under-use of the Government's early release programme to reunite a large number of mothers with their children have put at risk the right to family life of up to an estimated 17,000 children of mothers in prison. One of the issues that the Committee and charities who campaign around this concern frequently raise is the fact that the government does not know even the most basic information about the numbers of women in prison who are separated from dependent children.

Early on in the coronavirus outbreak, the Ministry of Justice announced plans that low risk prisoners, pregnant prisoners and women in mother and baby units would be released early in order to reduce the number of people in prison sharing cells and dormitories and try to restrict the spread of the virus. However, the MoJ has not followed through on these plans with the latest data (published on 3 July) revealing that a total of just 193 prisoners had been released in the first 13 weeks of prison lockdown. Instead, it has relied on keeping prisoners in virtual solitary confinement and building temporary cells to try to reduce the numbers sharing accommodation. After weeks of a slow but steady fall in the prison population, almost entirely due to the fact that the courts have been operating at only a fraction of their normal capacity, last week marked the first official increase in the numbers of people in prison. With the courts now starting to catch up on their backlog, the prison population might well start to rise again quickly, putting more pressure on prison staff and the MoJ.

The Human Rights Committee made five key recommendations:

1. The Government should consider the temporary release from prison of every low risk mother of dependent children, alongside pregnant women and women in Mother and Baby Units.
2. Children must be allowed to visit their mothers in prison on a socially distanced basis, where it is safe for them to do so. Any prohibition of visiting must be both necessary and proportionate in each individual case;
3. It should be mandatory to ask all women entering prison whether they have dependent children and what their ages are.
4. Prisons should undertake an annual census asking women whether they have children and what their ages are. This information must be collated and published; and
5. Where a prisoner would previously have been able to attend a funeral of a close family member in person, arrangements must be made for them to attend remotely.

The Committee acknowledged the challenges that coronavirus presents but concluded:

“COVID-19 causes lasting injury. But so does separating a child from its mother. The way to protect public health is not to damage children but to release low risk mothers and reinstate socially distanced visits.”