This article presents the results of a study carried out in Finland on the position of children who accompany their parent to prison. The study consists of document analyses and staff and inmate interviews in the two Finnish prisons with special units for children. The results highlight the lack of information on children residing in prisons as well as the lack of guidelines for practice illustrated by the term "institutional invisibility." The term "institutional invisibility" informs about the vagueness of the prison practices in relation to children and their parents.Keywords children residing in prison, mother-and-baby units in prison, child's best interest
The article examines the representation of children’s views in Finnish court decisions regarding care orders. It explores how written court decisions recognise, address and use children’s views in care order decisions and compares the results with a similar study conducted in Norway. In the literature, both countries are portrayed as having a child-orientated child welfare system. Based on the analysis of 36 court decisions in Finland, it is argued that children’s views are narrowly represented and used in written court decisions of care orders. Three models emerged: the direct and indirect representation of children’s views and the absence of children’s views. The first model is strongly related to the child’s age.
This article explores the process through which children in prison with their imprisoned parent have become a target of social concern in Finland. It is asked how the new social problem of ‘children in prison’ has been constructed. The data consist of relevant parts of the legislation and official documents. Three phases of social problem construction are named: (i) Children in prison as a practical and private matter; (ii) intense debate, problem formulation and developing practices and (iii) a public institutionalised practice. The position of children changed from one of invisibility to the target of protection. On the basis of children's rights, children in prison became understood as a group of children who are in need of child protection services. This example demonstrates how the images of problems construct solutions for practices.
A B S T R AC TThis paper explores the practices concerning family relations as described by women inmates in Finnish prisons. The aim is to study how family relations are experienced as family practices in relation to institutional interference on the basis of qualitative interview data (n = 17). The study demonstrates that the prison stay of a family member means an exceptional institutional intrusion in the family's everyday life. A prison's task is to organize a sentence. At the same time, the institution modifies the practices of being a family by allowing or restricting the relations between family members. Consequently, this can be seen as a question of governing the family relations by appraising and standardizing the family. The study demonstrates, firstly, that there is a need to acknowledge and explore the diversity of family relations on the practical level and, secondly, that a wider perspective of family relations in an institutional context can be captured by combining the concepts of institutional and family practices.
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