Methodology

The report draws primarily upon academic, peer-reviewed research. The scope is global, but all research needed to be published in English. Key words/phrases were used to source relevant papers, including ‘intergenerational offending’, ‘offending transmission’, and ‘intergenerational crime’. A total of 44 research papers were reviewed covering a mix of methodologies; they included eight systematic reviews and three longitudinal studies.

The key findings were:

• There is a strong correlation between parental offending and child offending, established across numerous longitudinal studies across different jurisdictions.
• There is clear evidence to suggest that children with a parent in prison are at risk of poor outcomes (in terms of mental health, behaviour, wellbeing etc.). However, the extent to which parental imprisonment is a specific cause of these poorer outcomes is unclear (i.e., poor outcomes may result from other factors such as socio-economic disadvantage).
• There are complex reasons why children with an offending parent are at higher risk of offending. These encompass both intrafamilial (e.g. parental supervision of the child, addiction) and socio-economic (e.g., economic deprivation) factors, meaning a multi-faceted approach is needed.
• Recent research has found the effect of parental offending on children differs according to the gender of parents and children. Having a convicted mother was linked to an increased risk of a daughter offending, but having a convicted father was not linked to an increased risk of the daughter offending. However, the number of girls who offend is generally small, which might explain this finding, as noted by the authors. There was a strong link between having a convicted father and boys’ offending, and the same trend in the context of boys and convicted mothers. However, in-depth analysis suggests a direct link between fathers’ offending and their sons’ offending, whereas the link between mothers and sons is not direct and is instead mediated via factors such as the father’s drug-taking.
• Longer periods of parental imprisonment are associated with an increased risk of the child offending.
• Type of offence is an additional factor. The children of people who commit violent offences are more likely to commit violent offences also.
• There are, perhaps unsurprisingly, very few external evaluations of interventions aimed at reducing intergenerational offending. Equally, there appears to be very few interventions that explicitly state that an aim of the intervention is to reduce intergenerational offending. The only ones that come to my mind were the New Labour Government’s investment in the Sure Start programme as part of a number of measures intended to tackle “cycles of deprivation” which had an implicit goal of reducing generational offending as well as improving health and wellbeing outcomes and economic prosperity.

Helpfully, the authors also identify several protective factors which are linked to improved child outcomes. These include individual (above-average intelligence, pro-social attitudes), familial (positive relationships with at least one parent, parental supervision) and community factors (peers who did not offend, non-disadvantaged neighbourhoods). These tie into a British study on risk factors which suggests that interventions need to be multi-level and address structural factors such as economic deprivations as well as individual and familial concerns such as parenting and education.

Other protective factors includ, the resident carer coping well, the child’s mental wellbeing and having a forum in which they can express their needs and emotions.