Parents in Prison

Overview

What’s it like when your mum or dad go to jail?

Adele Roberts meets Aobh and Fern who feel they were treated like criminals, when they’d done nothing wrong.

Every year hundreds of thousands of young people experience a parent going to prison. Adele goes to meet two of them to find out what it’s like to have a parent behind bars.

Aobh is 16 and her dad has been in jail for two years. When she first found out, she was scared to leave the house and felt anxious the whole time. Eventually she got help and is now looking forward to her dad coming out of prison.

Fern, 24, is pregnant with her third child, and is finding it hard to cope without the support of her mum. Plus the amount of online abuse her mum got when she was convicted of her crime still upsets her.

For Aobh and Fern, the worst bit is being treated like criminals when they have done nothing wrong. They are in effect serving a ‘silent sentence’.