The clamour for har sher prison sentences is louder than ever, but in depriving criminals of their freedom, we’re also depriving thousands of children of their parents. Amanda Cropp reports on the plight of those paying for crimes they did not commit

New Zealand has one of the highest rates of imprisonment in the world and by 2016 our inmate population is expected to hit 10,700.

When Verna McFelin hears statistics like that, her first thought is not the financial cost of building and staffing new penal institutions, but the human costs borne by the estimated 23,000 children whose parents will be incarcerated.

McFelin is the CEO of Pillars, an organisation that has helped about 7000 prisoners’ families since she founded it 22 years ago. That move was prompted by her husband being sent to prison when the youngest of their four children was just six weeks old. McFelin refers to her work promoting a crime-free society as a “godly calling” and this short bustling woman with striking long blonde hair is a tireless advocate for a group that attracts scant public sympathy and little attention from those in authority.

When Pillars was left off the list of organisations invited to a Ministerial Drivers of Crime summit last year, McFelin admits to being “pretty peeved”, but instead of sitting around fuming she wrote a 34-page submission detailing how extra help for prisoners’ families could make a healthy dent in our recidivism rate and prevent intergenerational offending.

That submission pulled no punches, describing families dominated by greed, selfishness and instant gratification. People who spend the proceeds of crime on drugs, alcohol and gambling rather than food, clothing and shelter for their children, who are not valued, are poorly parented, and receive a substandard education.

Rather than write them off as hopeless causes, Pillars provides intensive social work support to about 70 families in Christchurch and Auckland. As finances permit, it plans to expand nationwide from a head office tucked away in an industrial area behind Christchurch’s AMI Stadium. A child’s drawing on the boardroom wall shows a sad-faced dad staring through the barred windows of a brown building with menacing dark clouds overhead, while the rest of the family waves at him longingly from a neighbouring house. It speaks volumes about the distress kids feel at being separated from loved ones in prison,  something McFelin understands only too well. She says the worst part of her husband’s imprisonment was the nine months he spent on remand where the “no touching” rule meant he  couldn’t hold her hand or hug the kids, and she is the first to admit that crowded prison visiting rooms are hardly conducive to maintaining normal family relations.  “You almost need counselling skills to communicate with a person in a visiting room... You’re face to face, you can’t walk away. It’s noisy, there are security people walking around listening to you – it’s a completely different environment to being at home.”

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