WHY WE MUST HELP CHILDREN OF PRISONERS
Family is affected and involved in the prison sentence. It affects everybody close. (Anonymous prisoner)
With fast growing prison populations around the world, children are increasingly exposed to parental imprisonment. Children of prisoners are at greater risk of undesirable outcomes such as;
1. stigma
2. poor academic achievement and truancy
3. early pregnancy
4. substance abuse
5. Child labour & exploitation, Child trafficking
6. delinquency
7. gang involvement
8. Homelessness, others end up as street children .
9. Children are distressed by the separation.
10. trouble maintaining contact with the imprisoned parent
TRAUMA OF PARENT–CHILD SEPARATION
when they arrest a parent sometimes it is done in the presence of the children, so the parent is taken away from the children in such a violent and rough way that traumatizes the children to see their father or mother being handled in a bad way, the way of arrest most of the time is so rough, one is just bundled up and throw under the seats of a pickup and stepped on by the police on a 999 vehicle. In some rare cases one is simply summoned at the police and the children never see their mother or father return home again. Some children become stranded in court when their mothers are imprisoned.
The children never get to know what and why the arrest happened and it is something they never expect.
Some times women are imprisoned with their babies or when they are pregnant, when the child is 18 months it is handed/given to the relatives of the prisoner/mother, you can imagine such a separation from the prison to the community to people who the child has not grown up with.
This is traumatic and harmful to the children and interferes with the ability of children to successfully master developmental tasks. The combination of many effects of parental imprisonment produces serious long-term outcomes, including intergenerational incarceration."

The big picture.
From our experience and research from several countries its been proven that parental criminality is a strong predictor of children’s own criminal behavior, which suggests that children of prisoners are likely to become tomorrow’s criminals. The presence of children of prisoners is real and concerns everyone, because every day we are all targets of crime and its effects. If the child of a prisoner becomes a criminal tomorrow we are all potential victims. When we help children of prisoners The rate of recidivism is also reduced because when inmates know that their children are being cared for and when they are visited by their children this makes some of them repentant and upon release they dedicate their efforts to looking after their children instead of going back to criminal acts. Interventions like those of Wells of Hope lessen on crime in society; there is every reason for you to be part of our interventions.
Government spends a lot of money curbing crime and also maintaining people in prison, when you help a child of prisoner you are helping to lessen on crime and its effects on society and lessening on expenses involved with crime management.

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