Inside the prison doing family visits differently - as children visit father 'at work'

Sky News

3 days ago

Kane, Harley, Harris and Nelly seem like any young family.
The kids - three-year-old Harris and four-year-old Nelly - are excited. They are going to see their dad at "work". They are sweet, energetic little children about to head out for the day.
Harley, 30, and Kane, 32, talk via video chat about what they'll do when they meet up and what they are going to have for dinner.
It feels like a pretty normal family dynamic, with one crucial difference: Kane is in prison for drug offences, and the video call was connected from HMP Oakwood in the West Midlands.
1:42
We got to spend the day with Harley, Kane and the kids as we experienced what as many as 10,000 children experience every single week: the feeling of going into a prison to see a person you love.
There's another crucial difference between what we witnessed and what most other kids have to go through. We were going to a prison rated among the best in the UK for family visitation.
The data is spotty, and the exact percentage is tough to measure, but it's regarded throughout the criminal justice ecosystem that a person who receives family visits while incarcerated is 39% less likely to reoffend.
The better the visits, so the thinking goes, the more the chance of reoffending diminishes.
Our prisons are close to full: as of 28 July, there were 87,966 people in prison in England and Wales. The prison capacity is 89,373, so we are at a rate of 98.4%.
That's why a number of prisoners have recently been released early - and why, earlier this year, there was a landmark review into sentencing by David Gauke, which aimed to reduce the number of people sent to prison in the first place.
So, how does a programme like the one at Oakwood fit into that?
Their scheme, called Journey At Home, seeks to make a family visit as rewarding as possible to the family involved if the prisoner exhibits the right kind of behaviour to show they can handle the responsibility.
As we were told by Sean Oliver, the director of Oakwood - yes, it's the prison's job to punish. The deprivation of liberty and personal autonomy does that - but it's also the prison's job to mould an individual to be a member of society upon their release.
And it's a connection with family which goes a long way to providing the prisoner with the incentive to come out reformed and stay out.
But it's not just the impact on the prisoner. We wanted to explore the impact on the family of losing a loved one to prison.
And that takes us back to Kane and Harley's house.
It's 10am and we are getting ready to leave with them. It takes two hours minimum to get to and from the prison holding Kane, and the little ones do it week in, week out.
Harley tries to make it all as normal as possible. But it's anything but. That's why she calls it "going to see daddy at work".
She tells me later in the car ride over, she tries to protect the kids as much as possible. She knows Nelly knows the truth, but is too young to vocalise her feelings about it.
And this visit for Harley, Harris and Nelly mirrors Harley's own childhood experience. She, too, had to visit her dad in prison and reflected on how different it was for her kids.
She says when she went in, there was nothing for her to do but sit around a table. She said she was bored. But for her kids, they end up meeting other children during the visits and playing with them, making the experience less scary.
In a field where some of the data can be argued over, one element is solid: a parent going into prison for a child is an adverse childhood experience.
Shona Minson, a leading researcher in children's experiences within the prison system, says losing a loved one to prison can be more destabilising in a child's mind than a death.
She told Sky News: "So death happens, you know the person's gone, you know they're not coming back.
"Prison, someone goes in, you don't know when they're coming back, so they've lost all kinds of things, but they don't know if they're lost permanently or temporarily."
That's why there are growing calls to provide more support to the families of prisoners.
Leanne Hennessey, the family interventions manager at Oakwood, says: "Prisoners in here have got a lot of support.
"They've got their family. They've got us. But yet, the family on the outside haven't always got that."
And that's a feeling echoed by the Ministry of Justice, which said: "We know growing up with a parent in prison can have a devastating impact on a child's life chances - which is why we're ensuring these children are better identified and get the support they need.
"The Prison Service offers a range of services to maintain family relationships in prison, including social visits and family days."
Back in Oakwood, after a journey that saw us stuck in a traffic jam, the kids are searched, and then we are guided through to meet Kane.
We are in a large hall, not unlike a church hall, with a kitchen at one end. Kane enters through a side door and calls out to his kids.
The family runs to him - apart from the little boy Harris, who is distracted by a toy.
The warm family reunion over, it's time to cook.
Kane is making them brown stew chicken - a Jamaican classic.
I ask him if he's Jamaican. He says no but adds: "What happens when you're cooking with different people on the wing all the time, you know, you've got different people from different ethnic backgrounds, you've Asian lads cooking curry, teaching us. We all look after each other on the wings."
I ask Kane about his family and how seeing them this way makes him feel.
He says that without them, he doesn't know where he would be. They are his incentive to behave well and get out of prison. He's due for release in 2029.
Daniel Daly runs the visits at the prison. He's a man who admits he got into the work by accident but now feels it's something of a calling.
He really believes in what he does and sees the benefits for the prisoner in having that family connection.
Mr Daly says that during a visit, there is often a "paradoxical moment".
"In that split second," he tells Sky News, "[prisoners] stand still and have a realisation".
"The children have just left, they look at you and think, 'I can't come back. I don't want to say goodbye'.
"Most people wouldn't say goodbye and say see you later today. But for some of these gents, saying goodbye might be a couple of days, might be about two weeks. That goodbye is too long.
"So for me, yeah, it's a paradoxical moment, that split-second where they just think: 'You know what, I need to be a better man.'"
After hours of largely unsupervised interaction, Kane and his family sit down for a meal.
The four of them sit around a table, talking, eating and being together - maintaining that familial bond.
We thank them and say our goodbyes.
In his eponymous 2017 review, Lord Michael Farmer - who was recruited by the last Conservative government for a review into family visits - found that prisoners are 39% less likely to reoffend if they see their loved ones.
That was a figure he was given by the MoJ to work from, he says, and while his 2017 recommendations were largely listened to by the government, he believes more needs to be done to improve these prison visits.
"If there's somebody there on the outside ... who you know cares for you," he says, it can "impart in the prisoner a sense of responsibility".
He talked back in 2017 of family visits being a golden thread that ran through a person's rehabilitation.
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HMP Oakwood is run by G4S and may be exceptional at family visits, but it is certainly the exception when it comes to the prison system.
And for Kane, Harley, Harris, and Nelly, it's making all the difference.
The hope is that its example can be replicated, where appropriate, in other prisons.