Parenting from Prison: Innovative Ways of Maintaining Connection with Children, Families and Significant Others

This article describes and discusses ‘Invisible Walls’(IW), a pioneering ‘whole family’ approach to enhancing imprisoned fathers’ ties with their children and families. It summarises earlier evaluation findings on the Lottery-funded Invisible Walls Wales (IWW) project in HM Prison and YOI Parc, Wales, UK, outlines its influence on policy, and discusses how th e model has since evolved. In Parc,
partnerships with schools now play a significant part; a further important development has been efforts to break down silos and make ‘family’ services available to all people in prison and their ‘significant others’. The paper also addresses the problem of replicating or adapting successful local projects on a much larger scale: experience from IW suggests that this can be helped by individual establishments exchanging ideas, but achieving and sustaining high volumes of beneficiaries requires commitment and investment by government, combined with culture and attitude change at local level.