Invisible Sentences: How Parental Incarceration Shapes Children’s Lives
In today’s post, Dr Vicky Saunders - a Senior Research Fellow at ACU’s Institute of Child Protection Studies - turns our attention to a group often left out of conversations about the criminal justice system: the children of incarcerated parents. Exploring what matters to these children, Dr Saunders explains why their voices must be listened to and what must change to ensure they are better supported.
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In Australia, thousands of children live with the reality that a parent is in prison. For some, that parent has been in and out of custody for much of their life. For others, incarceration arrives suddenly, tearing apart fragile family stability.
These children rarely make headlines. They are not counted in official statistics in any systematic way. They are invisible in our justice debates. And when we do talk about “children of prisoners,” the conversation is too often filtered through adult voices, parents, caregivers and service providers, rather than hearing directly from the children themselves.
In the ACT, a qualitative study set out to hear directly from children themselves. Sixteen children and young people aged 8–18 shared their perspectives on contact with their incarcerated parent. Their experiences, often complex and contradictory, offer a confronting challenge to the way our systems think about punishment, care, and children’s rights.
Relationships Shape Everything
The study found that the quality of the relationship before prison was the most powerful factor in whether children maintained contact. When parents and caregivers had cooperative, respectful relationships, children were more likely to sustain contact. Where family violence, neglect, or conflict between parents existed, contact often dwindled or stopped entirely.
For many children, incarceration compounded pre-existing trauma including poverty, unstable housing, parental substance abuse, and mental illness. A few spoke of prison as paradoxically stabilising. It meant their parent was in a known place, sober, and contactable. For others, separation hardened the distance between them.
Children Want a Say but Rarely Get One
One of the key findings of this study was how little choice children had in whether, how, or when they saw their parent. Younger children almost never had a say. Adults, whether the other parent, a carer, or a caseworker, made the decisions, often without explaining them. Some children didn’t even know their parent was in prison until years later.
As they became older, some young people began making their own decisions about contact. However, here, too, they often felt unsupported. Wanting to see a parent who was considered “unreliable” could mean going against the wishes of caregivers. Choosing not to see a parent could spark guilt, pressure, or conflict with siblings.
The Emotional Push and Pull of Contact
Children’s accounts of contact differed. Some described visits as precious, moments to maintain love and connection. Others found them awkward, stressful, or disappointing. Prison rules often stripped visits of privacy or warmth, with surveillance and rigid behaviour requirements. Even sporadic contact carried emotional weight. Knowing what a parent was doing, through letters, phone calls, or family gossip provided some comfort. However, feelings of disappointment were common with narratives that included a promised visit that never happened, a parent who disappeared after release, or the cycle of reoffending and re-incarceration.
For children who had witnessed violence, particularly fathers’ violence against mothers, the decision to maintain contact was fraught. Some cut ties entirely while others tried to manage contact in ways that wouldn’t harm the non-offending parent.
Practical Barriers with Gendered Impacts
The logistics of prison visiting, distance, transport and visiting hours were major barriers. ACT policy required children under 18 to be accompanied by an adult, making access impossible without a supportive caregiver. This requirement has a distinctly gendered dimension, as mothers are most often responsible for facilitating prison visits. Consequently, their capacity and willingness, shaped by factors such as safety, relational dynamics, and resource availability become critical determinants of whether and how a child maintains a relationship with the incarcerated parent.
Financial constraints also represented a substantial barrier to maintaining contact. While a minority of families accessed assistance from charitable organisations to offset expenses, for the majority, these costs constituted a significant deterrent to visitation. This burden is further compounded by the gendered division of labour within many families, where men were the primary earners. Their incarceration often results in reduced household income, leaving women, who typically assume primary caregiving responsibilities, with fewer resources to facilitate visits.
What This Means for Feminist Justice
A feminist approach to justice demands that we see beyond the individual offender to the network of relationships, often women and children, impacted by incarceration. This means recognising that:
Children are stakeholders in justice decisions, with rights to information, participation, and safety.
Caregivers, often mothers, are gatekeepers of contact, carrying the emotional and logistical labour of facilitating or preventing visits.
Structural inequities—poverty, gendered violence, racism—shape the conditions under which contact is possible or healthy.
The study’s message is clear: children want and need more agency in decisions about contact with an incarcerated parent, and they need systems that prioritise their wellbeing. This requires child-focused corrections policies, safe and welcoming visiting environments, and long-term support for children navigating the grief, anger, and hope that parental imprisonment brings.
If we ignore their voices, we leave them to manage complex family dynamics on their own, too often in silence. If we listen, and act, we can begin to design a justice system that holds adults accountable without punishing their children in the process.
About the author: Dr Vicky Saunders is an experienced social work researcher and practitioner with a strong interest in working with children, young people, and families experiencing vulnerability. As a Senior Research Fellow at ACU’s Institute of Child Protection Studies, her research is driven by a commitment to social justice and the promotion of child and family wellbeing, focusing on evidence-based, trauma-informed, and equity-focused approaches to the prevention of child abuse and neglect.
Moderator: Molly Saunders