Chloe and Rachel still wake in the night crying for their mother. They are not infants. The twins are aged 11 and starting secondary school this month. But their mother, Charmaine, has been in jail for the past three years, and has at least two more to serve.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a terrible, terrible thing for the girls,\u201d says their grandma Margaret Jones who, at the age of 59 should be making indulgent grandparental visits but now, instead, cares for them full-time. \u201cWhen they were only eight they lost their mother, their friends, their school, their home all in one go. I think they found it not too bad to start with \u2013 it was a bit like a holiday \u2013 but later when they realised she wasn\u2019t coming back for such a long time they found it very difficult.
\n\u201cThe twins have gone through some very emotional times \u2013 and they still are. Emotionally I think they are still doing quite badly. Even now they need hugs all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
More than 4,000 children every year in England and Wales move in with their grandmothers because their mother has been sent to jail. Another 5,000 are taken in by other family members or friends. Some 2,000 others are adopted or fostered because their mother is behind bars. Those who volunteer \u2013 often at dramatically short notice \u2013 are faced with substantial responsibility, stress and expense as a result.<\/p>\n
It often begins with a sudden call from the local police station or social worker. \u201cRelatives get a call out of the blue to be told: \u2018Can you come and pick this child up from us, otherwise they will go into care\u2019,\u201d says Sarah Salmon, deputy director of<\/p>\n
Action for Prisoners\u2019 Families. \u201cIn some cases it is not until the woman gets from the court to the prison that she announces: \u2018I\u2019ve left my baby with a neighbour who\u2019s expecting me back\u2019 and the authorities have to go round.\u201d<\/p>\n
Children often seem an after-thought in the British criminal justice system, says another charity involved. Grandparents Plus is campaigning for changes to the system in order to put the interests of children first. Its policy and research manager Sarah Wellard says: \u201cOne of the appalling things is that a child can go off to school without any idea that their mother is going to be jailed and that nobody is going to be there to pick them up. There is no duty to inform social services when a mother is given a jail sentence. It can leave children in a very vulnerable situation.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is revealing that a charity acting for grandparents is taking a lead here. Only a few children are cared for by their fathers when their mother goes to jail. That has far-reaching consequences. When a father is jailed, it is likely that his children will remain in their own home with their mother. But when a mother is put behind bars her children only 9 per cent are cared for by their fathers.<\/p>\n
That is, in part, a reflection of the widespread dereliction of duty among many fathers in modern society. But it is also because some of the men are also in prison; a survey of the women at HMP Styal showed that as many as a third had their partners currently in prison. \u00a0But it also reflects the fact that twice as many women prisoners were single parents before they were jailed, compared to the general population.<\/p>\n
The impact of this is significant. It means that a mere five per cent of youngsters stay in their own homes once their mother has been imprisoned.\u00a0 A study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that the impact of imprisonment and separation disrupted every aspect of the lives of the family left behind.
\nImprisonment has profound affects impacts on psychological health of both the children and their new carers. \u00a0Margaret Jones is visibly upset as she recounts her family\u2019s experience. \u201cRachel will end up in tears at bedtime even now, three years on. Sometimes she wakes up and has had a dream about mummy being hurt. They worry that their mother isn\u2019t coming back,\u201d she says. \u201cChloe has had a lot of problems \u2013 sadness, anger, you name it we\u2019ve had it. Her behaviour and attitude has been very bad\u201d. Chloe is now under the care of the Child Mental Health Service.<\/p>\n
All this is despite the fact that the twins \u2013 unlike many prisoners\u2019 children \u2013 have been able to visit their mother regularly. \u201cWe have been lucky that she has been placed in two prisons that are reasonably close to where we live,\u201d grandma Margaret says. \u201cBut it has just been luck \u2013 there isn\u2019t anything in the system that thinks about the practicalities of how children can visit their mother.\u201d<\/p>\n
Having a mother in prison can also quickly stretch family finances to breaking point. Not only does the family lose the prisoners’ former income, but extended family members are often forced to quit work to care for their children.<\/p>\n
That happened to Sue Smith, a business consultant who was forced to reduce dramatically the time she could spend on work to enable her to care for her grandson. She spoke as she sat in a budget hotel inWakefieldnot far from New Hall prison from which her daughter was due to be released next morning. With her was her 3 year old grandson. Sue had brought him to see his mother as she walked through the 20 foot high metal-mesh fence that separates inmates in the closed women\u2019s prison from the outside world.<\/p>\n
Her daughter\u2019s offences were related to such a history of drug abuse that social workers had made it clear that the child would be taken into care as soon as he was born. Sue and her husband took out a Special Guardianship Order then and began to pick up the pieces of her daughter\u2019s life. \u201cHe calls meNan,\u201d Sue says, \u201cHe is four next month and is a very happy, confident well-adjusted little lad. He treats my other daughters as his big sisters. To all intents and purposes me and my husband are his Mum and Dad.\u201d<\/p>\n
But she has seen her income fall by three quarters since she began caring for him. \u201cWhen you are a grandparent or kinship carer you always have financial problems. I\u2019m self-employed and I had to downsize my workload to cope \u2013 not just with the child but because there are the battles with the prison over all sorts of things which are very time-consuming and emotionally exhausting.\u201d<\/p>\n
The majority of grandmother carers are older women who find it impossible to get back into work during or after the childcare. According to Grandparents Plus 47 per cent of carers who were previously working gave up their job when the child moved in. And 41 per cent are now dependent on welfare benefits.\u00a0Yet unlike new parents or adoptive parents, family carers are not entitled to paid leave from work to meet the children\u2019s needs. Unlike foster parents they receive no allowances or payments from the state.\u00a0 Many are tipped into poverty as a result \u2013 leading to deprivation and hardship for the children in their care.<\/p>\n
Margaret and her husband have found it difficult to afford the new school uniforms for the twins start at secondary school. \u201cFinancially it has been very difficult,\u201d she says. \u201cWe get no allowance; all we get is child benefit and tax credits, Having the twins also put us in debt as it took so long to get child benefit and until we got that we could not get any other benefits.\u00a0If we were foster carers we would get paid.\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition to normal childcare costs the families of prisoners have additional expenses. Women prisoners wear their own clothes not prison uniforms, so their families have to find the money to buy clothes to be set in. Many try too to send in cash for the prisoner to buy phonecards to ring their children.\u00a0 The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates that the average additional cost to relatives of a prisoner is \u00a3175<\/p>\n
per month. Most prison charities think the figure is higher.<\/p>\n
Some local authorities do give kinship carers an allowance of around \u00a3200 a month from the local authority, according to Sarah Salmon of the charity Action for Prisoners\u2019 Families. \u201cBut someone in a neighbouring authority will get nothing,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s a\u00a0 Postcode Lottery.<\/p>\n
Nor is such assistance matched to the needs of the children. \u201cYou can have a child with serious emotional problems whose carers get nothing in terms of support,\u201d says<\/p>\n
Sarah Wellard of Grandparents Plus. \u201cAnd in some areas social workers will work tirelessly to get people support while in others they do not see the need for it\u201d.<\/p>\n
The strain of caring also throws up personal problems for the grandmothers. \u201cIt affects your social life,\u201d says Sue Robson, who is 52. \u201cAt my age none of my friends or peers have got children any more so it\u2019s difficult to get babysistters. It also sets up tensions in the family because my other daughters, who ought to be able to rely in me to give them some help as a grandmother, have to help me instead.\u201d<\/p>\n
Margaret Jones has similar problems. \u201cI have lost touch with all my friends. We used to go out most weeks. All our friends have families who have grown up. They go off for the weekend all the time but we cannot do any of it. We need to be here 24 hours a day, seven days a week for the girls. We also can\u2019t afford to go out. I do feel very isolated sometimes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Depression among grandmother carers is unusually high. So are stress-related illnesses as a result of the extra care burden combined with declining physical health. And family relationships are destabilised and fragmented as a result of the pressures of what can be a very isolating experience.<\/p>\n
A number of charities are campaigning for more state support for the emotional, financial and practical needs of the carers \u2013 and their children. The charity Kinship Carers wants a national allowance. \u201cIt should be straightforward, transparent to all carers and irrespective of the child\u2019s legal status,\u201d a spokesman said. At present financial support is often refused if the child has not previously been in care. Grandparents Plus also wants kinship carers to be entitled to unpaid parental leave.<\/p>\n
For some prisoner’s families the sentence is open-ended. Within one week of being released from New Hall prison, Sue Smith\u2019s daughter was admitted to a Mental Health unit. Sue will continue to look after her grandchild indefinitely now.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n The names of the prisoners and their children have been changed<\/em><\/p>\n Additional reporting by Sarah Cassidy<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Chloe and Rachel still wake in the night crying for their mother. They are not infants. The twins are aged 11 and starting secondary school this month. But their mother, Charmaine, has been in jail for the past three years, and has at least two more to serve. \u201cIt was a terrible, terrible thing for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,432,37,30,38],"tags":[423,11,68],"class_list":["post-6181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-family","category-politics","category-prisons","category-society","tag-child-protection","tag-children","tag-prison-reform"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6181"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7238,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6181\/revisions\/7238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Introduction: Children in peril as women are jailed in record numbers<\/a><\/h1>\n
<\/h1>\n
Introductory comment: The hidden victims of a \u2018lock them up\u2019 culture <\/a><\/h1>\n
<\/h1>\n
Part 1: \u00a0Babies behind bars <\/a><\/h1>\n
<\/h1>\n
Part 2: \u00a0The 17,000 children separated from their Mums <\/a><\/h1>\n
<\/h1>\n
Part 3: The grandmothers left holding the baby and bringing up the children <\/a><\/h1>\n
<\/h1>\n
Part 4: The devastating hidden toll on children \u00a0<\/a><\/h1>\n
<\/h1>\n
Part 5: More effective alternatives to custody <\/a><\/h1>\n
<\/h1>\n
Part 6: The changes that are needed<\/a><\/h1>\n
<\/h1>\n
Final comment: We risk creating the felons of the future<\/a><\/h1>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"