Changing how courts sentence mums

6 October 2026

Research has revealed the harm caused to children when their mothers are jailed and changed the way judges approach sentencing.

On the morning Joni was sent to prison, she got her children ready for school as normal. “It was business as usual. I went off to court with just a tissue in my hand,” she recalls. “I didn’t have anything packed or anything ready. When the sentence was handed out, it was a massive shock.”

Joni received a 38-month custodial sentence for fraud, starting immediately. “That was the first thing to hit me: my children. What’s going to happen to them?”

There had been no time to prepare them, no plan for where they would stay. Joni accepted that she was being punished, but she couldn’t make peace with the fact her children would suffer as a result.

The children no-one asked about

Joni’s experience is not unusual. More than half of women in prison are mothers and an estimated 17,000 children are separated from them each year. Yet for years little, if any, consideration was given to how children are affected when their mum is given a prison sentence.

Judges focused on the offence and the defendant before them. “Nobody asked if they had children or what would happen to those children if their mother went to prison. Nobody was trying to find out,” says Dr Shona Minson of the University of Oxford’s Centre for Criminology. “There was this institutionalised blind spot.”

Thanks to Dr Minson’s research, those considerations can no longer be ignored. With support from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), her work has driven new sentencing guidelines for judges. And it has led to new probation practices that require courts to look at the impact on children when their primary carer is at risk of custody.

A blind spot in the justice system

As a former family law barrister, Dr Minson noticed a difference between how the system worked in family and criminal courts. In family proceedings, when the state separates a child from a parent because of harm or neglect, the child’s welfare was central. But while a criminal sentence could result in the same separation, very often the children weren’t even mentioned.

In one forum, the child mattered, and in the other, the child didn’t. That seemed to me to be a very clear wrong.

Dr Minson

Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford

To right that wrong, Dr Minson first had to prove that children were harmed when their mother went to prison, then use that evidence to compel courts to take it into account when sentencing.

Video credit: UKRI
Video transcript and on-screen captions are available by watching on YouTube.

Listening to the children left behind

The resulting study was the first in England and Wales to hear directly from children with lived experience of having a mum in prison. Over three years, Dr Minson conducted 35 interviews with children and their carers. She also spoke to 30 Crown Court and High Court judges to understand the way in which they considered children when sentencing.

Complex care arrangements and the stigmas surrounding maternal imprisonment meant reaching those families was a difficult and painstaking process. Dr Minson worked with charities, handed out leaflets in prison visitor centres and attended family days at HM Prison Holloway.

“It was time consuming but really important to hear directly from children at the point in time it was affecting them, because their subjective view mattered,” she explains.

Young lives turned upside down

The interviews painted a bleak picture. They uncovered wide-ranging harms to children, both in the long and short term. Children had left their family homes, changed schools and some had gone months without education.

They were separated from brothers and sisters because no-one could take them all. Mother-child bonds, especially important for young children, were permanently destabilised. “The over-riding emotion I heard from children was grief. They were just very sad,” says Dr Minson.

Lilly, sentenced to seven years for conspiracy to defraud, remembers prison visits where her daughter just put her head in her lap and cried. “My daughter was 14 at the time. She had to make a choice which of her siblings would stay together,” Lilly says. “Not only did she lose her mum, she lost her siblings, and that’s something that she’s never gotten over.”

Turning testimonies into tools for the court

Dr Minson realised that the evidence alone was unlikely to reach a busy court. With funding from ESRC, she worked with partners to turn her findings into four short films. Each was tailored to a different audience: judges and magistrates, probation staff, lawyers, and mothers facing sentencing.

The films gave professionals a clear, accessible way to understand children’s experiences and explained the court’s duties towards them. They were quickly adopted as learning materials for judges by the Criminal Bar Association and Judicial College, and by probation services as part of court training.

Changing how courts sentence mothers

But Dr Minson felt there was still more to be done. She used the research findings to push for an inquiry by the Joint Committee on Human Rights. This concluded that children’s rights were being breached. It led to changes in sentencing guidelines, which now say that if a defendant is a primary carer, the court must find out about the children and how custody will affect them.

Probation practice has also changed as a result, and pre-sentence reports must include details about the needs of dependent children. Appeal courts have even overturned sentences where those questions were not asked, including suspending one mother’s sentence so she could remain with her two-year-old.

“It’s not about special treatment for mothers but looking at the impact of a custodial sentence on their children,” explains Dr Minson. “What looks like a proportionate sentence without that context can seem disproportionate with it. So, it’s an important part of any sentencing decision.”

Research that changes the system

Dr Minson is now exploring other ways prison fails women, including the barriers mothers face when trying to take part in family court proceedings from inside. She wants her research to shed light on how prison can reshape families and communities long after a sentence ends.

Joni’s children could not be protected from the shock of her sentence. But thanks to the testimonies of families like them, gathered into evidence and used to inform policy, other children are now much harder to overlook.

As a barrister, I was dealing with things on a case-by-case basis. But with research like this, there’s the potential to change the whole system. There’s an opportunity to make things fairer and more just for everyone.

Dr Minson

Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford

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