17 February 2025 • Update
Supporting Young Fathers in Prison: A Path to Redemption and Connection
Imprisonment is a challenging experience for anyone, but for young fathers, it presents unique difficulties. A recent report titled "Care in the Prison Estate" sheds light on the lived experiences and support needs of young fathers, aged 25 and under, who are in prison. Presenting the findings of a qualitative study, conducted by the Following Young Fathers Further (FYFF) team at the University of Lincoln in collaboration with the Prison Advice & Care Trust (Pact), the report offers new insights about how young men navigate parenting while separated from their children and the extent of support they receive in relation to fatherhood within the prison system.
The report highlights the critical role of compassionate, family-focused support in helping young fathers both to maintain their identities as-fathers and their relationships with their children. Young fathers in prison face numerous challenges, including harsh conditions, isolation, and a lack of recognition of their identities as fathers. Many report feeling infantilised by prison officers, which is at odds with their roles as parents. Maintaining contact with their children is also difficult due to restrictions including the cost and availability of digital and phone contact as well as slow postal systems within the prison. Some fathers choose not to tell their children they are in prison to protect them, further complicating their parenting journey.
The study also reveals the varied co-parenting experiences of young fathers, ranging on a spectrum of supportive to strained relationships with their children's mothers. Many young fathers benefit from support in managing these relationships and the impact of incarceration on co-parenting dynamics. A significant challenge is that imprisonment stops young men from being named on the birth certificate, meaning these young men have no rights regarding parental responsibility.
Pact, a pioneering national charity in the UK, whose approach is underpinned by the belief that justice should be a process of restoration and healing, valuing the innate dignity and worth of every individual. Pact staff facilitate contact between the young father and their family through the provision of family days, one to one support and establishing lines of communication between the young dad and their family, even if relationships had previously been strained or broken. provides holistic and tailored support, including access to education and training, relationship advice, mental health support, and budgeting and money management. Family days organised by Pact are particularly valued, allowing fathers to interact physically with their children and family members, providing a reprieve from the challenges of prison life. Together, these activities support young fathers with ongoing communication between young fathers and their children, sustaining their relationships over time.
The FYFF team have made several recommendations to improve social support for young fathers in prison:
- Raising Awareness of the Pact Offer: Informing fathers of the support available when they enter the prison system and making prison officers aware of these services.
- Increased support for national provision of Fatherhood Programmes: More group sessions and fatherhood programmes to advocate for the transformative power of being a father.
- Provision of bespoke support for Coparenting and Rights Issues: including tailored support for managing relationships and securing parental responsibility.
- Engagement with Coparents: Supporting fathers to sustain and navigate their relationships with their co-parent.
- Advocating for Privacy: Safe and private spaces for fathers to communicate with family members.
- Securing Photographs: Helping fathers obtain photographs of their children to maintain a connection.
The "Care in the Prison Estate" report emphasises the importance of consistent and supportive interventions that invest in the fatherhood identity as a rehabilitative approach. By providing compassionate, family-focused support, organisations like Pact play a vital role in supporting young fathers to rehabilitate, to manage the challenges of imprisonment, to maintain their relationships with their children, and ultimately, support redemptive journeys that build towards their reintegration into society.
Photo: Andy Aitchison and Pact with permission
From our partners and young dads
“[daughter]'s almost two-year-old. She came up the house and she actually really liked it. Preferably my house is the best place for her to, for the contact to be, if I’m honest, 'cause we just buy toys for her all the time. We’ve got a lovely garden that she can play in, lovely, big, and we’ve got a sandpit in there. We’ve been buying loads of things for her to play with to keep her occupied.”
“[Speaking about support of young fathers] We’ve done a lot of kind of advocation and representing them, a lot of the time there’s involvement with statutory services. They don’t have the care of the young person, the care’s provided by the state or the mother, so we’ve attended lots of meetings with the young person to offer additional support and facilitated contact where necessary and offered just general emotional wellbeing, support, improving robustness and resilience, encouraging them to have as amicable relationship as possible.”
“And I suppose it goes back to what we were saying before about behaviours, maybe the education side of stuff and the fact that men aren’t involved in those early conversations, you know, whether it is, I know they’re invited to come along to bumps to babies but I don’t know whether we go into the detail around some of that brain development side of stuff and things like that. Maybe that is the thing that really would change things. You know, if you were given all of that information about what happens to a child as they grow, in a scientific way, as easy to understand as possible, could be the thing that impacted on behaviour in the home.”
“If your child’s with the mother, like your relationship with her depends on your relationship with the child, innit. That’s what I realised a lot, like you can try and be bitter, you can try and be this, be that, but it’s just gonna push you further away from your child, innit.”
“I wanna fight for more stuff for dads. Like I do wanna have that extra support for new dads or even existing dads that we don’t get now 'cause we’re still important too although obviously the mum does need the majority a’ the care because obviously of the after care and the birth. But like the dads take it extremely hard as well. And obviously with having no support I think it increases the rise of mental health.”
“I think both a mother and father combined, it’s communicating and both being on the same page of what’s best for your child or children, and for both, it’s just being there 100% for them and not, like, putting yourself first, it’s, you know, putting the child’s interests first... ”
“We need to be including, we need to not [just] be focusing on mum and child […] That’s a great focus but dad … dad’s not invisible, dad needs to be in the picture as well because there’s research that shows you the effect it has on children and families as a whole when dad isn’t in the picture, so services need to be changing the way in which they work so it’s more inclusive.”
“Cause I think a lot of the time, some of young people who end up having children have been through the care system or support systems and they can feel quite judged or labelled by organisations and it’s breaking the cycle and breaking them out of that to feel empowered to be able to take stuff back, that’s the real interest to me. So, it’s about getting support right, as in being there and giving advice and guidance and all them things that we can do, but also making sure that we are doing with people as opposed to people.”
“One of the most successful projects we ever did was an informal dads’ group, and it used to be on Saturdays […] they did what they wanted, they used to do things like breakfast, and they would have breakfast together and talk about dad stuff and where they were taking their kids. And that group was always really well attended because there was never an agenda. They were never judged. They were just there together.”
“...the whole stay at home dad thing is not something to be ashamed of, you know, if you’re a dad and you wanna take your daughter out for the day, or you wanna take your kid out for the day on your own, well why is that frowned upon, why can’t you take your child out for the day ”
“Oh…patience…compassion…tolerance, a whole boatload a’ that! Honestly, I like a whole lot of life. Sacrifice…compromise, yeah I think, yeah I think they, they would be the, the big, the five, I feel, I think that was five, they would be the main. ”
“We’re currently in touch with social services for two [dads] because they don’t understand why they can’t see their children because they haven’t been informed by social services, their partner. So there’s a massive communication breakdown with those young men, so that’s the main focus of what we’re dealing with at the minute.”
“it’s still…the…sense of judgement I get from other people when they find out that I have a child.And they say, ‘oh how old is she’.I say, ‘oh she’s ten’. And they say, ‘oh how old are you?’. Like you don’t need to know that....I know exactly where that thought process is going, you know. It’s like, ‘oh you look really young and you’ve had a kid’. It’s like, ‘yeah I know, I was there!’”
Partners
