Government does not know how many children have mothers in prison

The Joint Committee on Human Rights also urged the Home Office to consider the temporary release of all low-risk mothers, pregnant women and women in mother and baby units from prison, in a report published this week, ‘Human rights and the government's response to COVID-19: children whose mothers are in prison’.

The committee said it heard ‘heartfelt evidence from children separated from their mother’ during its inquiry in June. It heard how the prohibition of visits in response to the pandemic and the inability of the early release programme to reunite mothers with their children had put at risk the right to family life for an estimated 17,000 children with mothers in prison. However, the exact number is not known.

According to the committee report, the government does not have ‘even the most basic information’ about the numbers of women in prison who are separated from dependent children.

The committee recommended that children be allowed to visit on a socially distanced basis, where safe to do so, and that it should be mandatory to ask all women entering prison whether they have dependent children and what their ages are. Moreover, prisons should undertake an annual census asking women whether they have children and what their ages are. This information should be collated and published.

It also recommended that, where a prisoner would previously have been able to attend a funeral of a close family member in person, arrangements must be made for them to attend remotely.

Committee chair, Harriet Harman MP said: ‘One of the fundamental human rights is the right to family life.

‘It is children for whom this right is most important. Yet when the government banned children from visiting their mother in prison they trampled over that right.

‘They can put that right now by early release for those mothers who can safely go back home with their children and re-instating visits for the rest. COVID-19 causes lasting injury. But so does separating a child from its mother. The way to protect public health is not to damage children but to release low risk mothers and reinstate socially distanced visits.’

Find the report at: https://bit.ly/2YStPIC.