The Role of Family in Prisoner Rehabilitation

Introduction: The Hidden Victims

When someone is sentenced to prison, the criminal justice system treats it as the offender’s problem. The offender receives a sentence, the offender goes to prison. Yet this framing obscures the reality that imprisonment profoundly affects the entire family of the imprisoned person. Children grow up without parents. Partners become single parents or must navigate relationships at a distance. Dependent elderly parents lose care. Extended family feels shame and disconnection. The family doesn’t commit the crime, yet they face extraordinary consequences. Understanding prisoner rehabilitation requires understanding the family’s role, both because families are profoundly affected by imprisonment and because family support is one of the most powerful factors influencing whether someone will reoffend after release. The evidence is clear: maintaining and strengthening family ties whilst someone is imprisoned significantly reduces the likelihood they’ll commit further crimes. Yet prison policies often make maintaining family connection extraordinarily difficult. We’ve created a system that simultaneously harms families and undermines the very factor that would most help rehabilitation.

The Lord Farmer Review: What the Evidence Shows

The Lord Farmer Review, conducted independently and published by the Ministry of Justice, examined the relationship between family ties and reoffending. The findings were striking: prisoners who maintain close contact with family reoffend at substantially lower rates than those with weak family ties. The effect is significant—roughly a 39% reduction in reoffending for those with strong family support compared to those without. This isn’t marginal. This is a massive difference in outcomes. The mechanism appears straightforward: family members provide emotional support, practical assistance, social connection, and motivation to change. When someone is in prison, family ties represent a connection to the outside world, to people who see them as more than their worst action, to community and belonging. This is precisely what predicts eventual successful reintegration. Yet despite these findings, prison policy often makes maintaining family ties extraordinarily difficult.

The Practical Barriers to Family Contact

Prison visiting policies in England and Wales create substantial barriers to family contact. Most prisons allow visiting only during restricted hours, typically a few hours per week. For families not living near the prison—and many prisoners are located far from their home communities—visiting requires significant travel time and cost. A visit that takes place during a two-hour window might require four hours of travel time and substantial transportation costs. For families already struggling financially—and families of prisoners are typically economically disadvantaged—these costs are prohibitive. Many families can’t afford to visit, not because they don’t want to maintain contact, but because they simply can’t manage the costs. The alternative—phone contact—is often prohibitively expensive. Prisons charge for phone calls at rates substantially higher than commercial rates. A fifteen-minute phone call might cost several pounds, and families needing weekly contact might spend £50 or more monthly just on prison phone calls. For someone earning minimum wage supporting children, this is a genuine hardship. The result is that family contact becomes stratified by class—wealthy families can afford regular visits and calls, poor families cannot.

The Pandemic Changed Everything: Prison Video Calls

COVID-19 created a genuine innovation: video call systems within prisons, allowing families to maintain visual contact whilst remaining geographically distant. What was introduced as an emergency measure turned out to work remarkably well. Families who couldn’t afford to travel or spend hours in visiting rooms could see and speak with imprisoned relatives on their own time, within their own homes. The impact on family relationships and prisoner wellbeing was positive. The technology was relatively inexpensive to implement. Yet as with many pandemic innovations, the assumption was that this would be temporary. Video calls have been scaled back significantly. Some prisons maintain them, but access is often limited, and many families are back to relying on expensive phone calls or time-consuming visits. This is a genuinely frustrating step backwards, as if prison authorities discovered a more humane way to maintain family contact and then deliberately abandoned it. The evidence that video contact supports family relationships and reduces reoffending was clear—yet it was scaled back anyway, returning to more restrictive policies.

Children of Prisoners: The Most Hidden Victims

Perhaps the most invisible victims of mass imprisonment are children with imprisoned parents. Research from Barnardo’s indicates that approximately 200,000 children in the UK have a parent in prison at any given time. These children experience extraordinary challenges. They often experience sudden, unexplained loss of a parent. They frequently experience economic hardship as the imprisoned parent can no longer contribute to the household. They face social stigma and exclusion—children of prisoners are often treated differently by peers and teachers once the imprisonment is known. They experience traumatic changes in living arrangements and family structure. Many children develop emotional and behavioural difficulties as a result. Yet children of prisoners receive virtually no systematic support. Schools aren’t typically trained in recognising and supporting children experiencing parental imprisonment. Social services don’t proactively reach out to support these children. Charities like Barnardo’s do vital work, but they’re underfunded and can only reach a fraction of children who need support. The result is that we’re effectively punishing children for their parent’s crime, often with severe and lasting consequences.

The Financial Strain on Prisoner Families

One underestimated consequence of imprisonment is the financial impact on families. When the primary breadwinner is imprisoned, household income often drops dramatically. The family loses that income without any corresponding loss of expenses. A single mother loses her partner’s income and gains the expense of visiting, phone calls, and often travel to and from the prison. Extended families taking in children of imprisoned individuals face sudden financial obligations. The criminal justice system offers no support to families facing this financial hardship, despite the fact that family economic stability is related to reoffending risk. Someone reintegrating after imprisonment faces enormous pressure to secure employment quickly, not because rehabilitation requires rapid employment, but because their family is struggling financially and they feel obligated to provide income. This pressure can undermine rehabilitation. Someone desperate to provide money quickly might turn to quick money-making opportunities, including illegal ones, precisely because they haven’t had time to secure legitimate employment. Proper support for prisoner families—financial assistance, help navigating benefits, employment support for partners—would simultaneously support family wellbeing and improve reoffending outcomes.

The Visiting Room Experience

For families who do manage to visit, the experience is often dehumanising. Visiting rooms in many prisons are crowded, noisy, and lack privacy. Families are often subjected to searches that feel invasive and disrespectful. Rules around what can be discussed, touched, or brought are frequently arbitrary and humiliating. Rather than creating a space where genuine connection can occur, visiting rooms are often designed to emphasise security and control. A parent trying to maintain a relationship with their child in a noisy, crowded prison visiting room, whilst being observed by guards and subject to arbitrary rules about physical contact, is facing extraordinary obstacles to meaningful connection. Children visiting imprisoned parents often come away feeling scared, confused, and further traumatised. The experience of being searched at the entrance, seeing their parent in a prison setting, being unable to hug or hold their parent—these experiences can be deeply harmful for children. Yet prisons often aren’t designed with the awareness that they’re interacting with vulnerable children or with the intention of supporting family relationships.

Maintaining Parental Relationships From Prison

For imprisoned parents, maintaining meaningful relationships with children is extraordinarily difficult. Prison schedules, arbitrary restrictions, and lack of privacy make real parenting almost impossible. Yet maintaining that relationship is incredibly important for both parent and child. Children need to know they’re still valued by their parent, that the imprisonment doesn’t mean abandonment. Parents need to feel they’re still a meaningful part of their children’s lives. Programmes that support imprisoned parents in maintaining relationships with their children—parenting classes, supervised video calls, support for maintaining emotional connection—have been shown to improve outcomes. Yet these programmes are often minimal or absent. Some prisons have developed well-designed parenting support programmes, providing prisoners with training in how to parent from a distance, facilitating regular contact, and supporting genuine relationship maintenance. These programmes are underfunded and not available at all institutions. Imagine if every prison included robust support for imprisoned parents maintaining relationships with their children. The cost would be minimal. The benefits—reduced reoffending, improved child outcomes, stronger family systems—would be substantial.

The Shame and Stigma Facing Families

Beyond the practical challenges, families of prisoners face profound shame and social stigma. In many communities, having a family member in prison is experienced as a family disgrace. Relatives often keep this information secret, unable to trust that sharing it won’t result in discrimination. Children don’t tell friends their parent is in prison. Partners experience judgement for having chosen someone who ended up imprisoned. Extended family often distances themselves. This social isolation compounds the challenges. Rather than being supported through an extraordinarily difficult situation, family members often face isolation and judgement. This shame intensifies the psychological impact of having an imprisoned family member and reduces support-seeking. Someone struggling with the reality of having a partner in prison is less likely to reach out for support if they’re terrified that doing so will expose the family shame. This shame is also internalised by children—they learn that having an imprisoned parent is something to be ashamed of, something that makes them and their family fundamentally defective. These internalised messages can have lasting effects on how children see themselves and their family systems.

Partner Relationships and Prison Separation

Prison sentences create extraordinary pressure on romantic partnerships. Partners are separated, often for years. Communication is restricted. The emotional intimacy that relationships require becomes nearly impossible to maintain. Partners often feel they have to make an impossible choice: leave the relationship because they can’t manage the strain of separation, or stay in a relationship that provides no emotional support, physical intimacy, or partnership. Many relationships end during imprisonment. The person reintegrating after prison often does so without the support of their partner, without the family they built. This is a real loss, both for the returning individual and for the family. Yet society often frames this as inevitable—of course relationships end when someone is imprisoned. But this isn’t inevitable—it’s a choice embedded in how we structure imprisonment. If maintaining family relationships were genuinely prioritised, visiting policies would be more flexible, contact would be cheaper, conditions would be more humane. Some relationships would still end, but fewer would, and those that remained would have stronger foundations for supporting the person returning to the community.

The Role of Extended Family

Extended family often plays a crucial role in supporting people through imprisonment and reintegration. Grandparents take in grandchildren. Siblings provide emotional support. Aunts and uncles maintain contact. Yet extended family support is rarely acknowledged in criminal justice discourse, which tends to focus on the nuclear family. Extended family networks, particularly in communities with strong kinship bonds, can provide crucial support that stabilises the entire family system. Someone who knows their children are being cared for by loving grandparents who are keeping them updated about the imprisoned parent can focus on rehabilitation and on maintaining connection. Yet prison policies often don’t acknowledge extended family—visiting might be restricted to immediate family, phone calls might only be to an approved person, and there’s limited recognition that multiple family members might be supporting the imprisoned person. Policies that acknowledged and supported extended family networks would strengthen the informal support systems that often matter most.

Support Programmes That Work

Several programmes demonstrate what’s possible when family support is genuinely prioritised. The Family Ties project, run in partnership between prisons and charities, provides structured support to prisoner families, from information about the system to emotional support groups. Programmes providing free or subsidised visits to families of prisoners have shown positive impacts on family stability and prisoner outcomes. Video visitation, as discussed, appears highly effective. Parenting support programmes that help imprisoned parents maintain relationships with their children have shown benefits. Prison education and employment programmes that help prisoners develop skills for supporting their families upon release demonstrate impact. These programmes show that with genuine commitment and modest investment, family support can be substantially improved. Yet investment in such programmes is inconsistent across England and Wales, and in many prisons, such support is minimal or absent.

The Reintegration Phase: Where Family Support Matters Most

Family support becomes particularly crucial at the point of release. Someone reintegrating after imprisonment faces overwhelming challenges: finding employment, securing housing, reconnecting with a community that might reject them, rebuilding relationships that have been damaged by their absence. Yet many people leave prison without any systematic support, and some leave without their families—either because family ties have been severed by imprisonment or because family relationships are damaged or unsupportive. For those with strong family ties, reintegration becomes vastly more manageable. Families provide housing, employment support, emotional support, motivation to stay employed and avoid crime. Yet the criminal justice system’s contact with families typically ends at the prison gate. Probation services might interact with families, but comprehensive family support extending into the reintegration period is uncommon. Imagine if probation services worked systematically to support family reconnection, to repair damage imprisonment caused, to help families understand how they could support their relative’s reintegration. This would cost money, but the benefits would be substantial—reduced reoffending, stronger families, stronger communities.

Gendered Impacts: Women Prisoners and Motherhood

The impact of imprisonment falls differently on men and women, particularly regarding family relationships. Women constitute a smaller proportion of the prison population, but imprisonment has a disproportionate impact on their families. Women are more likely than men to be primary carers for children at the time of imprisonment. Their imprisonment therefore creates immediate crises for dependent children. The guilt associated with this—feeling that they’ve failed their children by being imprisoned—can be extraordinarily damaging to women’s psychological wellbeing whilst imprisoned. Yet prisons haven’t developed robust support for imprisoned mothers maintaining relationships with their children. Some prisons have mother-child visitation areas that are more child-friendly, but such facilities are uncommon. Few prisons have mother-child units that allow women to keep infants with them, an arrangement that exists in some jurisdictions and appears highly beneficial for both mother and infant. Pregnant women in prisons often don’t receive adequate maternity support. The criminalisation of pregnancy and motherhood that can result from women’s imprisonment reflects systemic failures to prioritise the wellbeing of both imprisoned women and their children.

Young People and Family Connection

For young people in the youth justice system, family support is even more critical. Adolescents are still developing, still forming their fundamental understanding of themselves and the world. Family relationships profoundly shape that development. Yet youth offending institutions often treat family relationships as peripheral to young people’s rehabilitation. Young people in secure facilities may have restricted visiting, limited contact, and little support for maintaining family relationships during what are often crucial developmental periods. The evidence on young offenders is clear: those with strong family support reoffend at lower rates and develop more positively than those without. Yet we systematically make it difficult for families to maintain connection. Visiting hours don’t accommodate school schedules. Transportation costs are prohibitive. The institutional culture often doesn’t welcome families. The result is that young people are cut off from one of the most powerful protective factors during a critical development period.

The Systemic Barriers to Family-Centred Imprisonment

Why, given clear evidence about the importance of family support, don’t prisons prioritise family connection? Several factors operate. Firstly, there’s a cultural assumption that punishment should be uncomfortable—that visiting rooms should feel unpleasant, that contact should be restricted, that the experience should emphasise the undesirability of imprisonment. Yet this assumption is counterproductive if the goal is actual rehabilitation rather than pure punishment. Secondly, there’s a resource problem—making family-friendly visiting areas, providing video calls, subsidising visits all cost money that prisons argue they don’t have. Yet these costs are minuscule compared to the cost of imprisonment itself. Thirdly, there’s an institutional inertia—for decades, family relationships haven’t been a priority, and changing this requires shifting how prisons operate. Fourthly, there’s a genuine security concern about family contact—restrictions exist partly for legitimate security reasons. However, many restrictions persist not because they’re necessary for security but simply because they’ve always existed. Removing these barriers would require genuine commitment from prison authorities and political willingness to prioritise rehabilitation over punishment.

What Proper Family-Centred Imprisonment Would Look Like

If prisons genuinely prioritised family connection as a rehabilitation tool, several changes would occur. Visiting hours would accommodate the reality of families’ schedules—evening and weekend visiting in addition to weekday visiting. Visiting rooms would be designed to be child-friendly, with appropriate furniture, toys, and spaces for families to interact naturally. Video calling would be free or heavily subsidised and available on-demand rather than restricted. Phone calls would be no more expensive than regular commercial rates or provided free. Prison locations would be considered in relation to prisoners’ family locations. Imprisoned parents would receive support in maintaining relationships with their children. Parenting programmes would be available to all parents. Pregnant women in prisons would receive appropriate maternity care. Young people would have robust family support as part of their rehabilitation. Families themselves would receive support—financial assistance, emotional support, information about the system. The cost of these changes would be modest compared to the cost of imprisonment and the benefits in reduced reoffending and stronger families would be substantial.

International Comparisons

Some jurisdictions internationally have prioritised family-centred imprisonment more than England and Wales. Norway’s prison system explicitly prioritises maintaining social ties, including family connections, as part of rehabilitation. Visiting policies are more flexible, contact is encouraged, and family support is integrated into the rehabilitation programme. Norway’s reoffending rates are substantially lower than England and Wales’, and this appears related to their emphasis on maintaining social connections. Scandinavian countries more broadly tend to treat imprisonment as an opportunity to address underlying issues and support eventual reintegration, rather than as purely punishment. This different philosophy translates into policies that systematically support family connections. This isn’t to say we should import Norwegian policies wholesale—England and Wales has different circumstances and challenges. But the evidence from international comparisons suggests that prioritising family support within the context of imprisonment is both feasible and effective.

The Call to Action

If you work in criminal justice, consider how your role could better support family connection. If you work in politics, advocate for policies that make family contact easier and cheaper. If you work in charities, consider how you could support families of prisoners. If you have resources, donate to organisations supporting prisoner families—Barnardo’s, Family Ties, and others do vital work with minimal funding. Most importantly, if you know someone with a family member in prison, recognise the extraordinary challenges they’re facing and offer support without judgement. Families of prisoners are often invisible and isolated, facing challenges that few understand. They deserve recognition, support, and the knowledge that research shows their connection and support matter profoundly for both their relative’s rehabilitation and their own wellbeing.

Conclusion: Family as Foundation

The evidence is unambiguous: family support is one of the most powerful factors influencing whether someone will reoffend after imprisonment. Yet our system systematically makes family connection difficult. This is a failure at multiple levels—a failure to support prisoner families, a failure to optimise rehabilitation, and a failure to prevent future crime. The good news is that this failure isn’t inevitable or irreversible. We could make different choices. We could prioritise family connection, could make visiting easier, could support family relationships, could recognise families as partners in rehabilitation. The cost would be minimal compared to the cost of imprisonment and subsequent reoffending. The benefits would be substantial. What’s required is the recognition that families matter, that they’re not peripheral to the criminal justice system but central to its success, and a commitment to making the changes that research clearly indicates would help. This would be good for people in prison, good for their families, and ultimately, good for the communities they return to.