Happy Valentine’s Day! If you go in for that type of expensive commercial gesture. I do not, anymore than I spend any money on ‘national read in the bath day’ which happened to be last Wednesday. It’s not that I’m not romantic, it’s just that my eldest daughter’s birthday is a few days after valentine’s and my wife’s Is a week later. Mine is a week after that so we don’t spend anything on Valentine’s in the increasingly unrealistic hope that we might have any resources left to celebrate my birthday.
In the spirit of inclusion however, I shall keep love and family as the themes for this week as we discuss Angel Tree.
It is estimated that there are 160,000 children a year with a parent in prison. This is two and a half times the number of children in care and six times the number on the Child Protection Register. The fact that this figure is estimated is key in my mind. The simple fact is that nobody really knows exactly how many there are and this is because as a society, we don’t really care. It’s not our responsibility to care. It’s the criminal’s fault. Whether you believe that or not you must admit that it certainly isn’t the children’s fault.
This is what Angel Tree is really about. The simple aim of Angel Tree is to provide a Christmas gift for the children of prisoners. I have been very surprised at the reaction of some people I have spoken to about this scheme. Quite often they tell me that it is the prisoner’s responsibility to look after their family, why should we help them?
This view seems to be symptomatic of a wider perception that, in my opinion, needs to change. I have generally found it to be the attitude in this country that family contact, visits, phone calls etc are a perk or treat that the prisoner may or may not deserve. We need to get away from this skewed view of the world and realise that they are in fact the RIGHT of the family.
We have a duty in a reasonable civilization to make people who break the law accountable for their actions. This often means prison. We have little right however to punish their families, yet this is exactly what we do. We continually imprison men and women in this country many miles from where they live making family contact difficult. Families are the forgotten victims of crime. A government study in 2007 stated that:
‘the children of offenders are an invisible group, there is no shared, robust information on who they are, little awareness of their needs and no systematic support.’
Though there is research to suggest that family ties can reduce reoffending by up to 39%, and in spite of the fact that the prison population has grown, the number of prison visits has fallen. What are we doing to help? Well, when we don’t even know how many families there are with a loved one inside, you tell me…
I can tell you what we at Prison Fellowship are doing to help and that is Angel Tree. We send Christmas gifts to over 4,000 children a year. In an effort to help even more families, we are running a pilot scheme whereby Young Offenders will have an opportunity to send a small gift to their mother for Mother’s Day. We have over 10,000 young people (18-20) currently in prison and over 2,000 children (under 18). We have only four specialist juvenile prisons and only about a dozen prisons with juvenile residential units.
Scatter this number evenly across England and Wales and you will have some idea how far the parents of imprisoned young people have to travel to visit their children.
After a week which involved much media and political debate about the rights of prisoners and their place in our society, we will continue to work towards the rights of some of the forgotten people society has failed.
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