It is being considered that children up to 5 years old will be allowed to stay in prison with there mothers.
At present it is up to 18 months.
Should children be allowed this ?, Is it good/bad for them.
Your views.

I think it is outrages.To effectively put a child in prison while the Mother does time is disgusting & immoral.The social services should plead about the childs welfare & whats up with the Dad or grandparents.Women who end up in prison for stealing or drugs should have there kids took off them.

I fully agree, and its the childs welfare thats most worrying.
Thats my view entirely, and I think this will become a popular topic.

Its an outrageous idea.

At the age of five a child should not be in prison with its mother. In fact once a child has stopped breastfeeding there is no need for them to remain in prison with their mothers.

How is this going to affect them for the rest of their lives? I do realise that separation of mother and baby will also have an impact on a childs life but do we really want our preschool kids with lasting memories of the inside of the mother and baby unit at Holloway?

Where is the interaction with other kids, playing in the park, nursery etc ?

One problem here is that in many cases the women are single mothers with no support - the father did a runner and Grannie and Gramps may not be in a position or even capable of fostering the kid for a couple of years.

We then get to the point of whether it's best for the kid to be with mum or in a foster home - in some cases the latter may be desirable.

Joe

Joe has highlighted the problems when the mother has no one to turn to and in this situation sometimes it's surely better to keep the mother and child togeather.
Of course there woul'd have to be the facilities in prison to facilitate this otherwise it coul'd prove to be a bad move.
I think children need to have at least one parent with them as much as possible at such a young age.
Of course one can say the mother shoul'd have thought about that before,but neverthe less what is done is done.

If there are proper facilities, especially nursery school, and sleeping arrangements are for mothers with children only, then it seems to me a good thing to keep mother and child together. I imagine more harm will be done if the mother's sentence extends beyond the five years of age limit for the child and it results in an enforced seperation with the child being taken into care or fostered, than whatever a child's limited understanding of living in prison might mean to it.

And I imagine it would only happen where there are enough mothers with chldren to form a viable community. [if only to justify the cost of additional medical facilities and teaching staff].

Considering how cushy prisons are these days I can't imagine it will look any different to the kids than a hotel.

I think the Mother would feel quite at home in prison with there offspring and could influance what they do when there released.
For example... They could re-offend knowing that if caught there child goes with them.
I say no children while in prison and this may learn them that if they continue with a life of crime they will loose there kids, then they may think twice against re-offending.
Anyway children are more cared for by foster parents than most women inside.

I have to say that seems very harsh to me,a mother and child ned to be togeather,fostering is no subsitute for a mothers love.

Would a mother want thheir child in prison with them?
It must be heartbreaking to be in prison without your child but surely a mother would want what is best for their child and that cant be prison, it sounds like a crazy idea. It is the mothers punishment for her crime, but whether the child goes into prison too or is put in care they are also being punished through no fault of their own.

What if a mother has 5 kids under 5? Would they all go in with her?

I think if the threat of not seeing there children when in prison would work as a deterrent.I f the Mother truly loves the child she would move heaven & earth to be with that child & not offend again.

I agree with Elf that if the mother truly wanted the best for her child she would not want them in prison with her and this would be as much a punishment as being in there in the first place.

I think that in order to create the best for the child whilst 'inside' the mothers would have to live in very different conditions and would probably see an increase in pregnancies due to the soft touch nursery prisons they would have to set up. I twould defeat the whole purpose for the mothers being in there in the first place.

Any women who is serving over a year in prison should not have the right to put her child in that environment. The service is as such that any sentence given is immediately halved and will lessen with good behaviour, possibly being transferred to less secure prisons - i think the less secure prisons - the 'open' prisons are a place where this would be viable for mothers and their children to stay but only where the sentence allows.

Moon Maiden
apologies for typing but this keyboard is rubbish

Originally posted by tosh13
Well Said MM Totally agree

WTF?! The nick is no place for a 5 year old... Or any child for that matter.

Yet another case of proving the Home Office don't know what they're doing :loopy:

Prison is a different place for a mother with a young baby. They have play group, nursery - everything they would have on the outside. They are taken on little trips and very probably have a much better start in life than they would have outside the prison their mother is in.

Social workers and trained carers are there day and night to help, and it is like a little community of women. The mothers are helped with the raising of their children, in the hope that these kids will grow up responsible and not end up where their mother is.

Some of the mothers are/were on drugs. Some come from an abusive home life. Some were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and now find themselves in prison for it. Not every prisoner is in there for crimes against society. If a woman has killed her abusive partner to protect herself, she may well still go to prison for it. Should her baby be taken away from her too?

I agree that prison is not an ideal place for children, but surely for a lot of them it is more stable than their life would be outside, in the big bad world, being looked after by an inept social service system that has already failed so many.

I must have imput into this subject due to working in prisons for the last 17 years (in Australia). We allow mothers here in QLD to keep their children with them in prison up to the age of 5 years, it used to be 12 months but over the last 10 years has been changed to 5 years old. The female jail has a bus service that collects children & takes them to kindergarten for the mothers wishing to let their children go. The education dept also supply toys educational ones. The mothers are put into what we call the residential side of the jail where rules are relaxed & the jail is more reflective of a home situation than a jail. There is of corse the other side to this coin, many mothers realise that if their child is with them they do easy time. There is usually more than one child in the family which means the other 3 or what ever have to be farmed out to someone, which raises the question of would they be better all being kept together. Quite often the mother is already living seperate from her children but when she is sent to jail all of a sudden she wants her 3 year old or baby or one of the children with her. Please don't think that the majority of mothers commit crime to feed their children either, their drug habit yes but not their children, as for it being a deterent forget it, most of them already had the kids before they came to jail.
Sorry folks call me a cynic or what ever but after seeing jail for 17 years my mind is already made up.

Janet Olsen.

What is the point in putting Mothers in prison if they have all the ammenities that is available on the outside.Children should not be put through that kind of problem,ok some women are in prison for different reasons but what about the prisoners who are seen as risks through drugs or theft,is it right that a child be subjected to those kind of people.As a Father & Grandparent under no circumstance would I allow any of my family put my Grandchildren through all that trauma.There are good Grandparents out there 7 Foster Parents.And I would say the same if the shoe was on the other foot & men could have there kids with them while they serve there sentence.

The point of prison is to deprive people of the freedom to go where they please, it is not to treat them like sh*t, chuck them in a horrible cell and forget about them until there sentence ends. There are many people who would like that to be the case but it isn't at present.

It is not as simple as saying it is cruel to children to put them in prison because of what their mother has done, because it is also cruel to deprive a child of its mother.

I'm not in the business of simple solutions, and this is not a simple issue.

Yes I agree it is criminal to deprive a child of it's Mother. But it's also a crime for the father & grandparents to lose there child.What about the Fathers rights!

The question of the fathers rights is a seperate issue,what needs to be uppermost in everyones mind is what is in the best interest of the child.
And to me that means being with their mother,provided the facilities are available in prison.
After all the prison sentence is supposed to re abilitate the prisoner and not simply to lock them up and forfget about them.

Hi Roy the Fathers rights are not another issue,the Father should have the rights to say wether they want there child being brought up in that sort of environment.The people who are in prison are in for a reason,rightly some are in because of abuse from partners & so on.But I would not wish my granchildren to be in that sort of situation

this only applies in open prisions not in closed prisions such as holloway etc! they wont let you keep a child in prison in a closed prision!