Unlocking lives of prisoners' children

LITTLE is known about how children fare if a parent goes to jail; too little, according to Susan Dennison, a recipient of one of the 200 Future Fellowships announced by Innovation Minister Kim Carr last week.

LITTLE is known about how children fare if a parent goes to jail; too little, according to Susan Dennison, a recipient of one of the 200 Future Fellowships announced by Innovation Minister Kim Carr last week.

Dennison, a psychologist in Griffith University's school of criminology and criminal justice, was already using an Australian Research Council linkage grant to begin estimating how many children have a jailed parent, when her $570,000 fellowship came through.

Present estimates, extrapolated from a 2004 NSW study, are that one in 20 Australian children has this experience and that in the case of indigenous children the number is one in five.

The prison population is on the rise. In Queensland it has increased by 142 per cent since 1993 and is expected to increase by another 90per cent by 2015, according to government figures. "When you consider that our prison population is increasing, then we need to think about what effects these policies to use imprisonment more consistently have on families and the life outcomes for children," Dennison says.

"It's not understood how parental imprisonment affects children, and who it affects the most - boys or girls, or which age groups - and if we can understand the time of greatest risk for children we can target programs to provide support for them and possibly recommend policy changes."

The risk she is referring to is that of children becoming offenders themselves.

Dennison wants to establish under what circumstances their experiences as a prisoner's child, or aspects of the life they have as a result of that, put them in danger of following in the parent's footsteps. "Once we know, we can call for resources to be put into programs to support children, for example, to assist them in staying in school," she says.

"Many children experience severe financial stress when their father goes to prison and may become reliant on welfare and supported housing, which means they may move from house to house and school to school, interrupting their education.

"And because of stigmatisation they feel they cannot reach out for the little support there is.

"Also, in many cases teachers are not aware the child's father is in prison and don't understand their behaviour at school."

Dennison notes "for some children their father going to jail might be a positive experience, if, for example, their father has been violent. But we are concerned that for many children it is very disturbing." The next phase of her work will be a longitudinal study.

"We will interview the primary carer of the child whose parent is in jail - probably the mother - as well as the child, in about 250 families across Queensland and compare them with families in which the offending parent has been given a community-based order. We are going to follow them up about 12 to 18 months later to see what changes have occurred in their behaviour and development and school work and situation."

This will reveal information about how the length of a parent's prison stay can influence a family.

"We are also about to begin interviews with about 100 men in prison in southeast and north Queensland about their role as fathers before and after they were jailed," Dennison says.