By The Irish Penal Reform Trust

For years now, IPRT has sought to shine a light on an overlooked group of families and children in Irish society – those with a family member in prison. Not only do very many families in this situation face ongoing stigma, but there is also a very real impact on their everyday lives. This report seeks to highlight the challenges these families and children face. What is clear from the research findings is that they regularly struggle to make ends meet and experience high levels of poverty and deprivation, often without access to dedicated or adequate support. We know that parental imprisonment can have an extremely detrimental and disruptive impact on a child or children as well as their partner and wider family. While previously IPRT estimated that more than 5,000 children had a parent in prison daily with over 10,000 children affected each year, with the current record prison overcrowding levels this number is likely to be much higher. In the absence of concrete and up-to-date data, it is much more difficult to identify the scale and type of issues that these families face. It also makes it harder to design and introduce policy solutions or interventions that could make a significant differenceRecent commitments in Young Ireland: The National Policy Framework for Children and Young People 2023-2028 to improve the reliability and accessibility of data on parental imprisonment, improve visiting conditions and put in place a policy as well as prison staff undertaking child-rights training, are all very welcome. The recruitment by the Irish Prison Service (IPS) of a dedicated Family Connections Officer is a step in the right direction. However, the IPS is not solely responsible for families and children impacted by imprisonment. This is a much wider issue that requires a whole-ofgovernment response and commitment. Very many of the children impacted will already be counted in the child poverty statistics as we already know that households headed by single parents experience the highest rates of poverty and deprivation. Yet, the connection is not always made that the reason for someone parenting alone is that their co-parent has been imprisoned and that these families have lost an essential income. At the same time, they are having to adjust to life withouttheir partner. The cost is not only financial; imprisonment takes an emotional toll on a person’s family and affects everyone’s mental health and wellbeing. Lives are turned upside down. This is very clearly seen in the responses from the people who were so generous with their time to share their experience for this report. Usually when a family suffers the loss of a parent, their extended family and community network rally around and support them, ask them how they are and see how they can help. However, the people who took part in this research tell us how they were treated differently – they were ignored, unfriended and no help was forthcoming. This is also evident at an official level – bereaved partners are able to avail of exemptions from some of the more stringent criteria to apply for social welfare support (and rightly so) but the same rules do not apply for families who lose a parent to prison even though they face the same drop in income, the same costs and a similar sense of loss.

Dublin: The Irish Penal Reform Trust (IPRT), 2025. 60p.