Last week (18 July 2024), the Ministry of Justice published a new set of statistics which estimates the number of children with a parent in prison. The stats are part of the Delivering Better Outcomes by Linking Data (BOLD) project. Children with a parent in prison are considered to be a hidden population, with data on these children held in multiple places across a number of government services. This report takes steps to bring this data together and to identify the scale of parental imprisonment, building collective understanding of the estimated number of children with a parent in prison, primarily by linking HMPPS data and the results from a data-matching pilot with His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC).
Methodology
These statistics have been compiled by extracting information from five different HMPPS data sources which relate to whether an individual has children. In addition to extracting information from structured data, data science techniques have been used to extract information from free-text case notes which contain information from prison and probation officers during contact with an individual. To validate the findings, the MoJ established a data-matching pilot with HMRC who linked a sample of HMPPS data to Child Benefit records.
The methodological approach involved three steps:
- A direct count of prisoners with children in at least one of the 5 linked HMPPS administrative data sources;
- Adjustment for undercount to create an estimate of prisoners with children;
- Conversion of this figure to an estimate of the number of children with a parent in prison based on a simple multiplier.
The HMPPS data sources used were:
- Prison contact lists in p-NOMIS – contacts who were under the age of eighteen on 1 October 2022 and listed as son, daughter, stepson or stepdaughter.
- The Basic Custody Screening Tool, which is part of OASys and is conducted within 72 hours of reception into custody. The BCST asks how many children under eighteen the prisoner has caring responsibilities for.
- Personal circumstances flags in the probation nDelius system – flags can be added to an individual’s probation record to indicate whether they have caring responsibilities under the category “Has dependents”.
In addition to these three data sets, the study also examined unstructured free-text data in the prison (p-NOMIS) and probation contact notes (nDelius).
‘Undercount’ is the number of prisoners with children estimated to be missing from the direct count and is identified based on the results of analysing the free-text case notes and the HMRC data-matching pilot.
Statistics are in aggregate form only, providing overall figures on prisoners and children, and were not used to identify individual children or prisoners.
Findings
Using data from these five HMPPS data sources, the MoJ directly counted 74,275 prisoners with children who spent time in prison during the period 1 October 2021 and 1 October 2022 – equivalent to 53% of the 139,562 prisoner cohort between these dates.
After making adjustments for prisoners with children expected to be missing from the direct count, it was estimated that the number of prisoners with children to be 108,990 – equivalent to 78% of the prisoner cohort.
Taking the estimate of the number of prisoners with children and combining this with the average number of dependent children per family, the MoJ estimate that between 1 October 2021 and 1 October 2022 there were 192,912 children with a parent in prison.
Conclusion
This is the first time we have had an official figure for the (staggering) number of children who are affected by having a parent in prison. The MoJ is committed to refining its methodology to make future publications even more accurate.
Of course, knowing the number of individual children affected is worthless unless it becomes a trigger for offering them ongoing support.
Thanks to Andy Aitchison for kind permission to use the header image in this post. You can see Andy’s work here
