Thames Valley Police Sergeant Russ Massie meets with local youth with incarcerated parents to help alleviate fears about police, in Oxford, 2022. (Photo courtesy of Children Heard and Seen)
In 2011, while working with children entering the criminal justice system, Oxfordshire Social Services’ senior manager Sarah Burrows realized that a high percentage of those youth had a parent in prison. Burrows presumed there was an organization dedicated to supporting these children, but she discovered that none existed in the United Kingdom. She couldn’t even find data on how many British children had an incarcerated parent.
Yet she was familiar with the data on the adverse effects of parental incarceration on children: The sons and daughters of prisoners are three times more likely to be incarcerated when they become adults and three times more likely to suffer from poor mental health or develop antisocial behavior than those whose parents have never been incarcerated. Further, parental incarceration poses a significant risk factor for drug abuse, dropping out of school, and future unemployment among children.
When a parent is incarcerated, families become vulnerable to financial instability, poverty, debt, and housing disruption. Caregivers often experience considerable distress, and children can become subject to unstable care arrangements. In addition, children often experience a type of bereavement from losing a parent who one day leaves the home and never returns. Or the child may experience the trauma of a police raid on the home.
While every new prisoner is asked if they are responsible for any children, distrust and fear of authority compel them to lie. As Burrows found, there is no official data on the number of children in the United Kingdom who are affected by parental incarceration, although the 2019 Crest Children of Prisoners report estimates the number to be 312,000 youth annually.
Burrows saw the need for an organization to support the children of prisoners. Currently, state provision is allocated exclusively to prisoners, with no funding directed to their children. She determined that a charity structure provided access to a wider range of UK funding sources than other nonprofit structures, since many funders prefer the higher governance standards required of a charity than those of a nonprofit. In July 2014, she founded Children Heard and Seen (CHAS), whose mission is to support prisoners’ children, to develop and demonstrate best practices for working with and supporting these children to break patterns of intergenerational incarceration, and to raise awareness to secure government funding for every child of a prisoner. Today, the charity has provided holistic support for more than 1,000 children and their families ensnarled in the criminal justice system.
Building Purpose, Belonging, and Trust
CHAS launched with a crowdfunding campaign that raised approximately £10,000 ($12,500) during the summer of 2014. Ralph Lubkowski, a warden of a men’s prison in Worcestershire, England, and CHAS’ chair of trustees, said that garnering institutional funding has been difficult because most large-scale funders require quantitative metrics such as “how much will we reduce reoffending by for every $10,000 donated”—a statistic impossible to determine based on CHAS’ model of support. The charity relies on crowdfunding, charitable trusts, and generous individuals like Emma Wilson, a corporate lawyer and an independent monitor of a women’s prison, who donated to the charity because she believes it provides a “really high caliber support” to the children while also raising visibility about an issue that has a “really low profile.”
That same summer, Burrows utilized her relationships within the local social-care and education systems to distribute materials that advertised drop-in events for parents, caregivers, and children in need of support. The events were funded by the Ian Mactaggart Trust and the Oxfordshire Community Foundation for a combined total of £10,000 ($12,500).
CHAS offers personalized services for children that blend practical and therapeutic elements. Every child is given the opportunity to have a mentor and a trained practitioner, who meet with the children outside of the home. The youth also participate in group work, with the groups tailored around identity, socioeconomic background, and the type of parental criminal offense. The goal is to help children heal from the trauma of parental incarceration by building their sense of purpose, belonging, and trust.
CHAS’ success is due to “being clear about what we want to achieve and never chasing any funding that doesn’t match our ethos.”
Once a family contacts CHAS, they are given access to nonfinancial supports geared toward addressing sources of insecurity for the family. For example, families can receive free legal advice about court processes, therapy and counseling for caregivers, and assistance with finding employment and housing and with accessing government benefits and social services. CHAS has even advocated for caregivers in family court in cases where the children were at risk of being taken from their caregivers and placed into foster care.
The charity’s strategic focus on dignity and well-being creates its own challenges. CHAS’ policy and strategic communications officer Felix Tasker says that funders often demand impact reports that ask, for example, “If we do X for Y weeks, what will be the impact on mental health and the offending rate?” But, he explains, “in reality, sense of purpose, sense of trust, and sense of belonging are hard to measure. We can’t even say exactly what we’ll do for each child because support is so tailored.”
CHAS’ bespoke services can be largely credited to many of its staff and trustees having worked in or with the criminal justice system. Burrows and CHAS’ chief operating officer, Leanne Manning, are both certified social workers. James Ottley, a manager who oversees in-person support, formerly worked as an “early help worker,” assisting children and families at the beginning of parental imprisonment so that they do not need formal social services intervention. Trustees include a prison warden (Lubkowski), a police superintendent, and a senior social worker. CHAS also works very closely with Thames Valley Police Sergeant Russ Massie, who conducts outreach work aimed at reducing children’s fear and distrust of police officers.
While some parents may initially be cautious around social workers as they fear their children may be taken away, they come to value the CHAS team’s expertise and ability to navigate the justice system. Jen, a mother whose two children have been supported by CHAS for the past six months, had to attend a child-protection hearing after discovering that her husband was abusing her daughter. With her and her children deeply distraught and traumatized, she said she appreciated Manning for attending the hearing to testify as an advocate for her daughter’s interests.
Pivoting to Meet the Moment
Because of the stigma surrounding crime and imprisonment, even social workers and educators often don’t know how to discuss parental incarceration with children. Alice, whose son was in kindergarten when his father went to prison in 2021, was astonished when his teacher recommended that she invent a fake story to explain his father’s absence. Alice wanted to be honest with her son but wasn’t sure how to talk with him.
CHAS’ approach insists on truth-telling because, as Burrows explains, “once children discover one lie about their childhood, they question everything else.” Children of prisoners often have significant distrust of authority figures and may be angry at what they perceive to be the unjust incarceration of their parents.
Children with a parent in prison often feel isolated and alone. To address these feelings and provide a supportive community, CHAS offers a range of in-person and online groups for them to meet, share their experiences, and form bonds to reduce feelings of isolation. Non-incarcerated family members also can often feel alone. There are groups for caregivers only and groups that include children. As Laura, a parent who has participated in these groups for the past six months, says of the other parents and caregivers, “We are all in the same boat and have grown to love each other.”
All of this support has been delivered with astonishing efficiency: It costs CHAS $1,400 on average to support a child. The charity’s annual revenue is now $720,000. Since opening in 2014, it has supported more than 1,000 children and is currently working with 343 children.
CHAS has changed a lot in the past decade. The charity initially operated from staff homes across Oxfordshire, which functioned as neutral spaces for support groups and meetings. By early 2020, it had expanded, opening an office in Oxford with five staff and 40 volunteers, who supported 123 children across the county. COVID-19 arrived just as this expansion happened, and the staff worried that the entire operation would have to shut down. A rapid pivot from in-person to virtual support not only saved CHAS but also transformed it. To ensure that families had the equipment to participate online, it launched a social media campaign for secondhand laptops. Both businesses and individuals gave generously. During the first year of the pandemic, in 2020, CHAS managed 20 support groups and provided 75 one-on-one support sessions every week.
While it is difficult to measure the comprehensive impact of the charity, after a decade of operations, only five children (0.5 percent) are known to have committed crimes. Manning attributes CHAS’ success to “being clear about what we want to achieve, never chasing any funding that didn’t match our ethos, taking our time, growing at a steady pace, and constantly asking [if it’s] working.”
CHAS’ future may be brief—at least in its current form. Within two years, Burrows wants the state to take responsibility for supporting every child of a prisoner and is advocating for new legislation that provides government funding for incarcerated parents and their children. She says that there may be a continued role for CHAS in training school staff and running support groups. But the charity’s aim is to stop existing in its current form.
Even if Children Heard and Seen secures new legislation, further challenges remain. Bureaucracies are rarely able to nurture the kind of love that lies at the heart of the charity’s model. If CHAS is to step aside, then it needs to find a way to embed its values in the national system that replaces it.
Read more stories by David Shipley.