As it’s coming up to Christmas, the biggest time of the year for family, I thought I’d share an article I did that won a Silver Koestler award. There will be many parents who will be spending Christmas locked up, and their children will be facing a Christmas day visit. Click below to see the article as a PDF and how it appeared in the magazine. Keep scrolling for a text only version.
FATHERS INSIDE – MAGAZINE VERSION
Fathers Inside – Text only version
Fathers Inside – Winner of Silver Koestler award:
Some of the hardest decisions that men face when they come to prison relate to their children. There are so many choices, and none of them seem ideal. Some families choose to keep the details of a father’s imprisonment secret.
“Daddy’s working away for a while”
It means a difficult time without seeing your children, but you can at least speak to them on the phone and send them cards and gifts on the major occasions. With luck you will progress to Open Conditions and be able to re-establish physical contact away from the prison environment. You will progress to home leave and finally be done with your sentence. You will be back home where you belong.
However, there will always be a risk of your child finding out. Depending on their age it could be through a slip of the tongue, an internet search or a spiteful gossip in the school yard…
“My Da says your Da….”
All going to plan, you will at least shield your child from prison for a while. However, if you have children you will know that they are far from stupid. They can pick up on the subtlest things. Just because they don’t tell you something does not mean that they don’t know about it (they usually wait until the worst possible moment to reveal their newest swear word or what Mom said about Auntie Joan’s cooking). With smartphones and other technologies so readily available you can be sure that kids will scour the internet as they grow up. Therefore, you will likely have to pick a point at some time in the future to explain to your child what really happened. Otherwise, when they find out for themselves, they will draw their own conclusions.
“YOUR DAD IS IN PRISON”
The other option is to be upfront and tell your child what is happening. But that still leaves a difficult decision for many families. The urge to see their children and maintain ties versus the desire to protect their children and their loved ones from witnessing the prison environment. Furthermore, many men won’t want to be seen in prison. There are all too real feelings of being ashamed or fearing that their families will think of them as failures. But if you and your family do decide that visiting you in prison is the best way forward, what should you tell your children? In an ideal world you would find a way to sit down with your family before you are due to be sentenced. Explain that Dad made a mistake and has to go away to apologise or to make amends. But we just don’t live in an ideal world. It is difficult, if not impossible to know what the right thing to say is. You want to put your families’ minds at ease. You don’t want them worrying about you on top of everything else that they are facing.
Which is why it just seems so easy to say:
I’m here with all of my friends.
It’s great fun.
We have a blast the whole time!
In our eagerness to put our kid’s minds at ease, are we in fact normalising prison? Will our children grow up having latched onto these words? Is this why the children of men who have been in prison are far more likely to face time in prison themselves? By trying to protect our kids we may be removing their natural, healthy fear of prison as a consequence for committing crime.
Our children are far more resilient than many of us realise. They can deal with what are often highly traumatic events, but it’s how they deal with them that is important. Is it better to shield them from things or should we trust them to have a better understanding, or a better handle on things than we might have expected? If we don’t educate our children we run the risk of them following in our footsteps and making exactly the same mistakes that we have.
I spoke to a fellow prison resident who was willing to share his experience.
A Dad’s story:
“I am the father of a 9 year old and, in 2016 I came to prison. My wife felt it was critical to be honest with our son about why I wouldn’t be around for the next three years of his life. While he was very upset at the start, he soon began to make sense of things. His first concern was for me! What was it like where I was? Did I have to wear an orange jumpsuit? (It’s amazing how kid’s minds work) But most importantly for him – did I have a friend? My wife and I did our best to put his mind at ease, as we felt the last thing he needed as he tried to come to terms with this upheaval was to be worrying about me. Having said that, we took care not to go too far in the direction of portraying the prison as a comfortable place where I was having a good time with lots of friends. He knows that I am locked up, that my freedoms are limited, and that the food is not great. He understands that there are some not very nice people in here and that generally, it is not a good place to be. We have tried to be as open as we possibly can, otherwise children will inevitably try to fill in the gaps for themselves – either from what they see on TV or through their own imaginations. One thing we didn’t anticipate was how he would deal with the questions from other children. On one occasion my wife heard a school friend had asked him “What does your Dad do?” My son had answered that I had joined the army and gone to fight abroad! We have since explained that this was probably not the best idea, and if he felt uncomfortable saying I was in prison that it was OK to say “I don’t want to talk about that”.
From the outset he was very keen to visit me and we decided that it was important that we respect his decision. However, on the first occasion we felt that it was important that my wife make that first visit alone. Not only were there a number of things that I needed to say to her without having to worry about being distracted by our young son, we also felt that my wife should be familiar with the routine and environment herself before she brought our son along. She was then able to explain what to expect and devote her attention to him on the day of his 1st visit which made that first experience a lot easier and smoother. He was a little apprehensive but soon relaxed and hasn’t looked back since. We also maintain contact by phone calls and letters, which means he has something tangible from me. I send him pictures and cut-outs of his favourite footballers and cars etc. from the newspaper. He keeps these in a “Daddy Box” that he can access when he wants. The library has been another great source of materials that I can copy and send to him! I try to stay one step ahead of him in his school studies so I can talk to him about the subjects and topics he is studying. But I try to strike a balance. I don’t want to ‘crowd’ him. I have to accept it when he indicates that he has spoken to me for long enough. I think that allowing him his own space can be just as important as keeping contact.
Finally, I want to say that I don’t have all of the answers. Every case and every family is different. However if what I have learned gets anybody else thinking about how they approach being a Father Inside, then it won’t have been a waste of time. Perhaps it might inspire somebody else to write with their own ideas and experiences. This is a subject that is too seldom discussed, there are no real guidelines out there. I would love to hear how others like me are coping. I never dismiss any advice out of hand and would welcome any useful suggestions.”
