Family is the key for breaking the reoffending cycle

Lord Farmer’s review on prison reform, launched this week at the Centre for Social Justice think tank, is ground-breaking for a number of reasons. For starters, it gets family. In an incontestably broad consultation, comprising hundreds and hundreds of interviews with prisoners across Britain, the resounding message that came back was about family. ‘If I don’t see my family I will lose them, if I lose them what have I got left?’, one prisoner told Lord Farmer. The statistics bear this out: the odds of reoffending are 39 per cent lower for prisoners who receive family visits than for those who don’t. To be left bereft by the family sucks away the motivation so critical to rehabilitation.

As for the families themselves, Lord Farmer highlights the hidden sentence served by the estimated 200,000 children affected by imprisonment. Against the backdrop of shocking levels of family breakdown among the poorest, imprisonment presents yet another form of it, with the absence of a typically male parent putting children at risk.