Introduction
In beginning a study of children of prisoners in Canada 2011, I immediately faced a significant hurdle: no one seemed to know anything about my topic. As I widened my net to approach policy makers, advocacy organizations, social service agencies, child welfare agencies, probation services, and anyone else I could think of, I kept receiving a variation of the same response: ‘Oh that’s interesting. We don’t have any data/ programs/ experience, but there must be someone who does?’ Few had any information, resources, or leads, which is curious given there are likely around 40,000 children in Canada who currently have a parent in prison (Knudsen, 2016). Even as I began to meet families of prisoners, I found that few wanted to participate, and a common reason given was that their child didn’t know where the incarcerated parent was.
While I eventually met with several very knowledgeable key informants and generous participant families, the pervasive ignorance about the experiences of Canadian children of prisoners was striking. Indeed, writing about families of prisoners often begins with a mention of their virtual absence from academic research until the 2000s. Until the recent escalation of research, this topic was under-examined, equivocal, and poorly understood, and continues to be so in some country- specific contexts including Canada. McCormick et al. (2014) write, ‘children of criminally incarcerated parents are an invisible population in Canada’. This invisibility extends beyond the lack of academic research; parental incarceration is often enrobed in secrecy, confusion, and misunderstanding— within families, in communities, and in public policy.
In this chapter, I will argue that children of prisoners are rendered invisible from the micro to the macro level, through a series of interconnected processes I will call systemic invisibility. While these children make up a sizeable population, and the experience and outcomes of parental incarceration appear to be significant, they are often hidden from view, subject to layers of invisibility. Starting from children’s own families, to their relationship with their schools and communities, to the policies and practices of the prison systems in which they are so tightly intertwined, and finally to the broader social policy context, I will discuss the ways in which parental incarceration is kept secret, enigmatic, and poorly understood. Finally, I will discuss the meanings and reasons behind these connected layers of invisibility.