Opinion: Children of Imprisonment

By Harald Breiding-Buss

It hasn’t exactly made headline news, but lately I’ve come across a number of newspaper columns and items mentioning, almost in passing, that New Zealand has the second highest imprisonment rate in the developed world, outranked only by the United States of America.

What’s more the government has already committed more than $800 million for new prisons to house the growing population of inmates, signaling that it is expecting it to rise even further.

But while there certainly is much awareness of the impact of crime on children, there isn’t any on the impact of imprisonment. However, with about 170 out of 100,000 people being in prison at any given time (or about nearly 300 out of every 100,000 men) there is a lot of children out there who have an immediate family member locked away.

And even more children are affected indirectly, or have been affected in the past.

Once you’ve done time in prison you’re up for a life sentence of career obstruction. Unlike in almost all European countries, your record is never wiped no matter how long you stay out of trouble (although the government introduced the ‘clean slate’ bill last year allowing some offences to be taken off the record after seven years, but not those carrying a prison sentence).

It is almost pointless to advise anyone who has been to prison to go to polytech or university, as disclosure of your criminal record is almost always required for any jobs requiring any decent qualification.

Here at Father & Child Trust we have seen some odd judgements passed down especially on young men.

One young man with African-American background snapped when his girlfriend and mother of his three year old child broke up with him and got involved with a white supremacist skinhead. This landed him one month in prison for ‘threatening to kill’, although this threat was only ever verbal and the guy had no previous convictions.

In another case a young man was locked away for three weeks for failing to turn up to Periodic Detention. The 24-year-old had two children directly dependent on him, a fulltime job and a postnatally depressed girlfriend in her late teens. The original conviction resulted from a bizarre accusation of assault by a man this young family had put up for home detention…

Seeing the justice system work first hand like this is pretty scary if you believe in ideas like ‘reasonable doubt’ and ‘innocent until proven guilty’. Where judgements are handed out by the dozen each day to people without a lawyer who is likely to keep an eye on fair process, decisions become arbitrary.

Once convicted, however, the question of how it came about becomes academical. You’ve got a record and, henceforth, are considered unsafe around children.

Some occupational paths are completely closed to you, and if your child comes to the attention of Child Youth and Family, for example because a doctor at the hospital thinks your child’s broken bone looks suspicious, you may suddenly find yourself removed from your child and barred from all contact, regardless of how good a dad you were.

And that is where we need to raise questions. An increasing number of children have first-hand experience of an important family member being in prison, or having been in prison. An increasing number of men become dads while having a ’record’.

National family spokesperson Judith Collins, when asked about what she thinks is appropriate for fathers in prison, answered that these men apparently haven’t taken their fatherhood role serious enough. And that is a valid viewpoint: do not allow men who have been in prison to raise children. It will mean more foster care, however.

Statistically things are more likely to go wrong for a child without a (biological) father in the house than with one who had been in prison. Assuming that child grows up within the social context that had landed dad in prison in the first place, that child is statistically also safer with dad around as the vast bulk of male child abuse is committed by new boyfriends or ‘stepfathers’.

Male violence is rarely indiscriminate—if it was we couldn’t allow any of our soldiers with actual combat experience to have children at all. And while men are far more likely than women to commit a violent crime, they are considerably less likely than women to abuse their own children.

Ironically, using violence is sometimes the only way a man knows how to protect his children. Doing nothing at a time when you perceive your family or your children to be under threat, physically or otherwise, goes against the grain of everything we teach fathers. What kind of action you take is driven by how you learned to solve problems.

If we do trust men with a ‘record’ to raise children, however, we would need to make it a little easier for them to meet our society’s expectations of a good father—and that still means that they have a potential as income earners.

Where legal ways of earning a decent living for their families are barred a man will have to prove his usefulness as a father in other ways. And that means that punishing the fathers the way we do it in New Zealand also sentences their children to a bleak future.