Helping prisoners become better parents

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0:30Myra Anubi:travel dollars work harder. Follow Smart Travel on your favorite podcast app. Dinner time. It's where little moments are cherished. With Blue Cash Preferred, get 6 % cash back at US supermarkets and bring everyone together. We did say everyone. Learn more at americanexpress.com slash explore-bcp. Terms and cash back cap apply with Blue Cash Preferred. Hello and welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Myra Anubi and I host the People Fixing the World podcast, looking at common challenges around the world and the creative ways people are trying to tackle them, from using poetry to make doctors more empathetic to how low-cost incubators are saving premature babies.

1:14You can listen and subscribe by searching for People Fixing the World wherever you got this podcast. In this bonus episode, I take you behind prison walls to hear about a project that's keeping families together while the fathers are behind bars. People fixing the world.

1:37I'm Myra Anubi and this is People Fixing the World from the BBC World Service, where we go above and beyond to find new ways to tackle old problems. Now this week, our focus is on fathers and how they can play a bigger role in their children's lives with a groundbreaking solution in a place you would not expect, a prison.

2:04I've just come through security and I am inside the largest prison in Scotland. Barlini Prison is home to around 1 ,300 men, serving a prison sentence for everything from petty crime to murder. It's supposed to be a really tough place. In fact, over the years, some prisoners have nicknamed it Bar Hell. Now, it's an old Victorian building with lots of high walls and barbed wire.

2:30Myra Anubi:It's been heaped in history, is it? Obviously, 200 years or whatever. It's got five separate halls. So it's quite a large community, I would say. Charlie Ross has been a prison officer here for over 30 years. He's almost part of the furniture. and he's now running a pioneering course called Healthy Dads, Healthy Kids, designed to help prisoners become better fathers. But why? Well, ultimately, they hope it can reduce re-offending. In prisons across the UK, nearly 30 % of prisoners will commit another crime in the year after they're released. So where exactly are we going now? We're going right up to what's called the Wellbeing Centre.

3:10Myra Anubi:So that's where we do our dad's only presentation. They do other things, they do like relaxation in there, art, music, all that kind of thing. And those sort of things are part of rehabilitation? Yeah, anything that we deliver now is all about addressing offending behaviour, whether that be through music, healthy dads, you know, improving relationships with their children, you know, it's all part of the big picture, if you're like, it's not just one thing. it's my first time in a prison so i'm a little nervous but the well-being center is a relaxing environment that doesn't feel like a jail eight prisoners dressed in blue and red sweatshirts are led into the room now these are the dads who've been selected for the course they take their seats and the classroom session begins charlie and his colleague craig cover all sorts of parenting skills, such as the dangers of screen time or the benefits of exercise.

4:09Today, however, the main focus is on what their children eat.

4:13Myra Anubi:Do you guys know their benefits? Self-eating? Just throughout the world. Better sleep pattern. Sleep pattern. Less weight. So you're saying better sleep pattern, so explain why that would be. The men are in prison for a variety of crimes, including drug offences and fraud. One is awaiting trial for murder. But they all have children aged between 5 and 12. There's a lot of animated discussion and laughs about junk food and how it's really hard to get kids to eat healthy. I get chatting to some of the prisoners about what they've learned. It's pretty bad for just getting them junk food and eating McDonald's and just to pacify them if they're maybe crying now.

4:53So learning about how it affects their mental health, their sleep patterns and stuff like that, definitely I think it helped. It was really good, yeah. The sessions are always good. You know, having a chat about everyone's kind of mental health in general is good. Do you think kids think about that when they're eating a bar of chocolate?

5:10Myra Anubi:No, I don't think they're eating a bar of chocolate. The course happens one day a week for a total of eight weeks. Now, parenting sessions are not common in prison, but they do exist. What's really remarkable about this course is what will happen later in the day when the prisoners get a chance to put what they've learnt into practice with their kids. But let's rewind for a moment because the original idea behind Healthy Dads, Healthy Kids actually came from miles away in Australia and it had nothing to do with prisoners. It was started 15 years ago by Philip Morgan, a men's health expert at the University of Newcastle in Australia.

5:53Originally, this started as a way to help fathers lose weight. But then we realised the holistic benefits of the program, given the challenges we have in society of physical inactivity, of poor dietary behaviours. So we get a huge range of father figures that sign up. And what's really interesting is that usually about half are signed up by their partners. They're like, what's this I'm being signed up for? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're like, you should go along and do this. It'd be good to spend some time with the children. What exactly does the program involve? What do the dads do? There's a dads-only session at the start, and that'd be covering the role of fathers and sports skills, how to emotionally connect with their children, and then they come in with their children together.

6:34So they do education content together, and then the practical session, which is really fun, where rough-and-tumble play and aerobic and muscular fitness. So they're getting a workout, they're developing their physical skills and having a lot of fun. it's interesting you should say this i have kids and every time my husband is throwing them up in the air i'm just like stop but you're saying some of these things are very valuable why yeah that's really interesting because many fathers bond with their children in what's known as an activation relationship very rough ways yeah yeah this is so good for children clearly helping them develop their sports skills is important so they become more competent and confident and more likely to play sports, which is good for your physical and mental health.

7:18There's a fascinating science behind that. Not only is it fun, but those children who are exposed to quality rough and tumble play have better emotional regulation, better social skills, because it actually develops the part of their brain, the prefrontal cortex. So reasoning and problem solving and creativity and decision making. So quality rough and tumble play, while it looks like, hey, stop mucking around, there's a science behind how important that is for children. Tell me a bit more about that. What's been the impact on the fathers and their families? The fathers, they become more active and so do the children, which is sustained.

7:53They're much more likely to eat their fruit and vegetables. And I think one of the most powerful things is the father-child closeness. So we improve the relationships within the families, but also the wellbeing of kids and the mental health of the fathers. In Australia, the Healthy Dads Healthy Kids program has been running since 2010 and around 1 ,500 families have taken part. Around the world, there are also versions of the program in the US, in Germany and in the UK. But how did this program end up in Scottish prisons? Well, that's thanks to two researchers, Kate Hunt from the University of Stirling and here, Cindy Gray from the University of Glasgow.

8:35Kate and I had worked on a healthy lifestyle programme for men in prison since 2012. And we had the idea that actually we could think about getting the men together to be involved in a parenting programme. And Kate had visited Phil Morgan in Australia and had seen the Healthy Dads and Healthy Kids programme in action there. And that really planted the seed that we should take that community programme into the prison setting.

9:05Myra Anubi:Cindy and Kate and her team kind of introduced us with this idea. It was very much wow. This is Neil Currie. He's head of offender outcomes at Barlini Prison. So the thought of bringing families and children, especially into the middle of Barlini Prison, was a challenge. The security implications of it, it was massive. The thing is, historically, visits, for example, were in visit rooms. There'd be real strict measures within a visit room, quite draconian measures you would probably say. But we were flipping to the complete opposite side, whereas we're allowing basically soft play between fathers and children in the middle of this huge prison.

9:48Must have taken a lot of convincing to do for the entire institution.

9:52Myra Anubi:Kate and Son are very convincing. But Healthy Dads, Healthy Kids needed to be adapted from a community-based course in Australia to a programme for dads in prison. The content of the programme is very different. So we've moved to much more focus on positive parenting in the prison-based programme. And we've also brought in a new element, which is a focus on mental health and resilience and dealing with life circumstances, both for the men themselves and also for the children. So can I understand, what were you trying to achieve with this, especially for prisoners who have also committed really tough crimes?

10:33So people make bad choices and their liberty is taken away and that's the punishment for them. But their families are also affected. And the problem is that many people who are in prison lose contact with their families. The family relationships break down, the children achieve poorly at school. So what we want to achieve is to provide an opportunity for people in prison to maintain and strengthen the relationships that they have with their children, to be better fathers, to be better role models. And the idea is then that family relationships are strengthening, that children have better relationships with their fathers, and their developmental and their educational outcomes are improved.

11:21Myra Anubi:OK, listen then, guys. So pair up. One's dad, one's kid, and we'll just go over what we're going to be doing this afternoon, OK? After the classroom session, the prisoners are led to a small gym. And here, Charlie takes them through the play activities they're going to do with their kids in a couple of hours. For now, the men take it in turn to play the part of the children. So, Dad, you're rolling the ball to the kid, and he's going to try and hit it. Yeah, just trying to hit it. Kangaroo is one bounce and then hits it. This is where you need to take rubber. I have to say, the games look rough and fun.

11:59Lots of balls and bats flying around. Now they've been designed to get the dads and their kids to be active and to really enjoy their time together.

12:08Myra Anubi:You want to make it stimulate for the kids. So make sure it's not too easy, not too hard. How did you determine which prisoners get to experience this? We liaised closely with our family contact officers. They kind of went through a process of working out who were the best people that would benefit from it, what families would benefit from it and what ones were able to take on all the learning. Because I know it looks like it's just fun, but it's educational, it's making people think about their own behaviours, their own role in their children's lives. It's interesting you should use the word fun, because I actually, in some moments, forgot that I'm in a prison.

12:48Some people will be listening to this wondering, why is there so much fun in prison? What would you say to that?

12:54Myra Anubi:So if you think back to probably your childhood and things like that, you probably had fun running about parks with your parents and kind of playing with balls or whatever. A lot of these guys don't recognise that that's a major part of their children growing up. Always weird doing replicating things like that. So, yeah, it does look fun, but there is a learning to it and there should be an outcome to it.

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14:24You're listening to People Fixing the World from the BBC World Service with me, Myra Anubi. And today we're in Scotland's largest prison, Barlinie Jail in Glasgow. looking at a unique program that's teaching painting skills to prisoners. We've heard how it all came about, but now it's time to see the most surprising part of the program. When the families get to come inside the prison so that the children can play and spend time with their dads. The kids are accompanied by moms and grandparents and they're all led into the prison gym. Now, a typical prison visit would be a bit like something you'd see on telly, in a visiting room with strict rules about touching and contact.

15:08In fact, prisoners here can't even move from their seats. But in these sessions, things are very different. The dads have just come in, and honestly, it's beautiful and emotional to see kids running up to them, hugging their dads. They haven't seen them in a while. in one corner of the room there's actually tears from one of the boys. The prisoners change out of their uniforms and into blue gym tops so that it feels less like a prison for the kids. And then Charlie starts the session.

15:40Myra Anubi:OK, so what we're going to do is start with to get a wee warm-up and we're going to get a game of Tig. Once they're Tig, they need to put their legs like that and then they go under their legs. So it's chaos. There's so many kids and the dads are participating. some of the things that they learned earlier, like curling up in a ball and then getting the kids to push them around. And even for the kids who were crying at the start, lots of laughter, everyone is engaged, and it's just good to see dads playing with their kids. And just to describe what's happening now, the dads are pretending to be surfboards.

16:17So they're lying on these mats and the kids stand on them and they have to pretend that they're surfing as their dads move from side to side. There's lots of laughter, also a lot of people falling down. And in the middle of the fun, there is a bit of education as well. The dads and the kids discuss what they've learned about junk food.

16:36Myra Anubi:Who wants to give me an example of what a sometimes food is? Yeah. Chocolate. Chocolate. Yeah, definitely, absolutely. And McDonald's. Oh, McDonald's, yeah, and a McDonald's. What about a sometimes drink? This is clearly a very special time for these families. Chris, who's serving a sentence for supplying drugs, says these sessions are so much better than regular visits. You can actually interact with them, play with them, cuddle them, throw them about. You know, you definitely, 100%, get a lot more time, one-on-one. You know what I mean? Plus with other visits, you've got other family members there, so you're trying to talk to family members, maybe about bills you need to pay, things that are happening in life, and you're maybe not as interested in the kids, whereas in this you're just one in one.

17:21So I definitely think it's a lot better than being in a normal visit. Another prisoner who's serving a sentence for fraud but didn't want to be named explains what these sessions mean for his family. This is as much harder on them, arguably harder on them, I would say, because they've got to deal with normal life and then them coming up and getting a bit of normality and seeing me because we are a really close family, you know, so I love them so much and I know they love me so much and I think not seeing them is horrendous and I think getting that two hours every week to have the session, it benefits them, and I can see that.

17:52When I talk to them on the phone, it's, you know, when am I seeing you, Daddy, when am I seeing you, and we can talk about this. But what about the families? As the dads bond with their kids, I take one of the mothers aside for a chat. What do you think about the session today, other than the fact that it's really noisy? No, the sessions are good. This is a typical example of how the sessions go. They're quite noisy, the kids are energetic. It's a much better quality visit than it is going to a 45 minute session over in the main building where you're sitting down and having to sit across from Dad and having to fight over toys and stuff like that.

18:25So this is much better. They get to run about like crazy and then we get to go and have dinner with them. I get dead emotional actually because it's... Yeah, well just watching, I'm feeling emotional as well so I can imagine what that's like for you. It is and it's so emotional. See when we went for a meal the first time because it's like the simple things you missed. We can wait. but listen it's great, I'm so glad we've got the opportunity to do this and I hope other families get to do it as well because you can see how great it is Just to understand, your child is a bit older does she know where her dad is?

18:59Yes she does, yeah she knows Things like this are vitally important because I don't know how long my husband's going to be here for I don't know if he's going to serve his full sentence or if it's going to get reduced but it was a shock to them when we told him that he was in prison in fact he didn't even get to say goodbye because we hadn't shared that part of the process with them. It was something we just didn't want to stress our children out about. And when I came home and told them that their dad had been remanded in custody one day, it was like... It was if I told them their dad had died and we hadn't, but it felt very much like that for them.

19:35So I appreciate getting to see them as often as I can. The only downside is I know this is coming to an end, but listen, we'll take it while we've got it. You see all these other families here, there's families here that have three and four children as well. And it's so hard, it's so hard not having your husband at home with you. I became a single mum overnight. Trying to navigate that in itself is horrible. I feel almost sometimes it's me that's been given the sentence and not him. But listen, here we are. There's no denying that prison has a huge impact on famines. Some of the mothers I talk to say their younger kids don't even know their dads are in prison.

20:17They've allowed them to believe that they're at work. But the reality is these dads are in here for a reason. There are people who will be listening to this, maybe even people who've been affected by crime, who will be thinking, why are these prisoners getting these liberties? What do you say about that? Not everyone in prison is a bad person. And also, it's not your kid or your family's fault that you're in prison, so it's no fair in my son that I'm not there because I've done that. So it's no fair that I'm not there to play games or teach him how to tie his laces. It's not his fault I'm in here.

20:49He's not done anything wrong. It's me. I would say that you don't know people's circumstances. I don't want to be here. I really don't. I'm focused on getting out as soon as I can to get my life back. Genuinely, there is bad people in the world, without a doubt, and I think people don't deserve stuff like this if they are a bad person. and I think the people that get it are the people that are behaving and trying to get their lives back on track. Today we've got a ton of kebab rats. We have pasta and meatballs. We have four different types of pizza. Once the gym session is over, the families all gather in the canteen to have dinner together.

21:26The meal, I have to say, is a lot of the sometimes foods, right? So you've got a lot of chicken nuggets, pizzas and plenty to go around. And just from speaking to the people here, it's clear that this is the most special bit of the entire programme. When they get to sit down and have a meal, almost like they're back home. The kids are talking, they're catching up on what's happening, and everyone seems to be enjoying and really engaged. I spy with my little eye something the colour of grey. Mum, give me a hand. What is it? All right, you're right, you're right. Prisoners like Chris and his family certainly get a lot out of these moments.