Fact check: Around half of prisoners say they grew up with both parents
The Conservative Party did not explain where a figure that its leader cited came from.
Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch said in an interview that more than nine in 10 men in prison grew up without their father.
At around 18 minutes and 20 seconds into the recording, Ms Badenoch said: “I think we have a statistic here that… 90% plus of the male prison population grew up without their father.”
Evaluation
It is unclear where Ms Badenoch’s statistic comes from. The PA news agency was unable to identify the source, nor were experts that were contacted. The Conservative Party did not reply to requests to clarify the source of this claim.
The most recent study that PA could identify suggests 47% of inmates say they grew up with both parents. Different research into young offenders has found that as many as 76% had an “absent father”.
The facts
The Conservative Party did not respond to requests to provide the source for Ms Badenoch’s claim.
PA searched for any sources Ms Badenoch could have been referring to, but nothing matched her figure. Representatives of both the Prison Reform Trust and the Fatherhood Institute said they were also unaware of any source which included Ms Badenoch’s statistic.
British prisoners
The Government commissioned research which surveyed inmates sentenced to between one month and four years in prison in either 2005 or 2006. This study was called the Surveying Prisoner Crime Reduction (SPCR).
Surveyed almost 20 years ago, out of the 1,428 who were asked and responded about who they lived with before the age of 17, almost half (47%) said that they had lived with both their natural parents all or most of the time. A third (34%) said they had lived with one of their natural parents. It was not specified whether this was their mother or father.
The SPCR survey appears to show a very different figure from Ms Badenoch’s claim. It is worth noting that the result also includes female prisoners, even though a large majority of the survey respondents were men.
A 1991 study found 68% of inmates in England and Wales said they had spent most of their childhood living with both parents, this included some (5%) for whom one of their parents was a step-parent and 1% who had adoptive parents.
In the same survey, 19% said they had lived mostly with one parent. This is again far from Ms Badenoch’s claim.
Young offenders
The number is higher among younger people in prison, although again not as high as Ms Badenoch suggested. Also, the Conservative leader said “men” and was not speaking about incarcerated children.
A Prison Reform Trust (PRT) study of 200 children who were sentenced to custody in the last six months of 2008 found that 76% had an “absent father.” That was defined as a child who “has lived apart from father for significant period of childhood; not solely through bereavement”. PRT defines a child as “all individuals under the age of 18 years”.
According to a 2009 report from the Centre for Social Justice, the Youth Justice Board said in 2002 that 70% of those in Young Offender Institutions came from lone parent families. PA could not identify the original Youth Justice Report document.
Definition of fatherless
It has not been possible to establish which source Ms Badenoch used, and she also did not define what she meant by someone growing up “without their father”. This could include anything from children who have no contact with their father, those who live with their mother but stay with their father regularly, or a more narrow parameter.
A 2015 paper found that eight in 10 separated fathers reported being in contact with their children; six in 10 saw their children once or twice a week, while four in 10 fathers had their children stay overnight “often”.
The United States
In 2013, a US politician made a very similar claim to Ms Badenoch, that more than nine in 10 felonies were committed by people who grew up in households without a father. Fact-checkers at Politifact stated at the time that this was “mostly false”, pointing to 2002 data which showed that 44% of inmates surveyed grew up with both parents.
As in the UK, children in US prisons are also more likely to have grown up without both parents. A 1987 study put the figure at 70% for American juveniles and adults, which is still well short of the figure that Ms Badenoch cited for British men.
