Children’s contact with their imprisoned fathers and the father–child relationship following release

Abstract

This paper investigates the influence of children's contact with their father during his prison sentence on the father child relationship after his release. It is based on a mixed method prospective longitudinal study of 40 families in England where fathers had played an active role in their children's lives prior to his imprisonment. Drawing on an interactional perspective of relationships (Hinde, 1976) the study found that face to face contact and phone calls correlated significantly with the child father relationship after the father's release as reported by both parents. Written contact played less of a role.The longitudinal correlations remained significant after controlling for the level of the father's involvement with his children before imprisonment. The quantitative findings were supported by qualitative data from the mothers, fathers and children which illustrated how contact enabled the father-child relationship to continue through the facilitation of familiar interactions (physical comfort, emotional support, discipline, guidance) even if, if in a limited and altered form. These findings suggest that contact as a form of interaction between father and child is important for protecting the childfather relationship during and after the prison sentence.

Falling Out of Time: The Challenges of Synchrony for Children with Incarcerated Fathers

“…Crewe, ; Medlicott, ). Previous research views children's relationship with their father as a consequence of the patterning of the interaction between them and examines the relation between frequency , quality of contact and the child's psychosocial functioning (Lanskey and others, ; Poehlmann and others, ; Poehlmann‐Tynan, ). While these studies consider the impact of paternal incarceration on children, recognition of children's agency involves exploring children's own experiences of time, including their perceptions of the past and future with their imprisoned father (Lanskey and others, ).…”

Entwicklungspfade der Straftäterbehandlung: skizzierte Wege und Evaluation der Zielerreichung

“…Dies galt auch dann, wenn Merkmale der vorherigen Familienbeziehungen methodisch kontrolliert wurden (Markson et al 2015). Es zeigten sich auch positive Auswirkungen auf die Kinder (Lanskey et al 2016). Die erfolgreiche Behandlung von Straftätern kann demnach zugleich präventiv für die nächste Generation wirken.…”

Playing games to re-story troubled family narratives in Danish maximum-security prisons

“…Moreover, prisoners’ partners and primary caregivers are found to experience loss of income, “extra burdens of childcare” (Murray, 2005: 444), social exclusion, and injustice (Comfort, 2007; Condry, 2018). However, in criminology, a growing body of work has strongly indicated that some of these effects may be mitigated if in-visit facilities and contact opportunities are improved to ensure enduring, meaningful interaction between prisoners and their families (see e.g., Bartlett and Eriksson, 2018; Beckmeyer and Arditti, 2014; Dennison et al., 2017; Jones et al., 2013; Lanskey et al., 2016). Originally, this work was premised on a human rights concern for not punishing innocent victims of crime (Boswell and Wedge, 2007; Shaw, 1992; Smith, 2014).…”

“…Imprisonment entails the disruption of continuous tellings of family narratives, and the sudden separation of a parent due to crime generates a need, from a child’s perspective, to re-story and scaffold existing family narratives. To fathom how visiting spaces provide conditions for either supporting or disrupting family ties, researchers have collected interview data from prisoners, primary caregivers, and, to a lesser extent, children about their perception of visits, what kind of familial processes take place (Tasca et al., 2016), in what way face-to-face visits differ from letters and telephone calls (Lanskey et al., 2016), and how improved in-visits may influence children’s well-being (Jones et al., 2013).…”