04/10/2026
Today in the Toronto Star, Daysha Loppie wrote an article on the number of children in Canada that had a parent in jail over the last 6 years. As mentioned in the article, our co-founder Dr. Jessica Reid, along with students from Osgoode Hall law students, wrote a policy brief that she presented to the House of Commons Standing Committee arguing several recommendations including that children with incarcerated parents should be recognized as victims under the Canadian Victims Bill of Rights. The full article is listed below:
About 170,000 Canadian children had a parent in jail over a six-year span, a new study shows. The estimate comes from a first-of-its-kind study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One. It tracked data from five provinces between 2015 and 2021, and found that thousands of children experienced a parent going to jail - some more than once. Until now, available data didn't capture how many children were affected by having a jailed parent or how it shapes their lives, a gap researchers say has made it difficult to design effective supports and services. "We need to identify these children, we need to care about these children, and we need to dedicate resources to these kids," said Martha Paynter. "The first step to do that is to acknowledge that they exist." Paynter is an associate professor in the Faculty of Nursing and Health Sciences at the University of New Brunswick. She's also a principal researcher of the study, alongside collaborators at universities and community organizations across Canada. It looked at five provinces - Alberta, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Saskatchewan - and found that for every 10,000 people, 229 children had a parent in jail. That's a higher rate than the European Union but lower than the U.S. The study used data from the Canadian Correctional Services Survey, a Statistics Canada data set covering 249,440 people in federal and provincial custody. Researchers identified children using birth certificates, child tax benefit records and hospital birth records for mothers in custody. They then calculated how many children under 18 had a parent in jail. Among affected children, 30.5 per cent had an Indigenous parent in jail and about six per cent had a Black parent. Indigenous and Black people make up much smaller shares of Canada's overall population. Previous research in Canada and the U.S. shows that families where a parent is in jail often face overlapping challenges, including violence at home, substance use, homelessness and poverty. Children with a parent in jail are at increased risk for emotional, psychological, behavioural and school-related challenges. "Parental incarceration is not only a criminal justice concern - it constitutes a fundamental violation of children's rights," said Christine Bentley-Wang, study co-author and assistant professor with McMaster University's Department of Pediatrics. Researchers and organizers have been saying this for years. In 2021, Kids with Incarcerated Parents presented a policy brief to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, arguing that children with incarcerated parents should be recognized as victims under the Canadian Victims Bill of Rights. In 2022, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child called for Canada to improve data collection to enable monitoring of child rights, particularly for children in vulnerable situations. Bentley-Wang says this latest study is in direct response to the call. "It is something that we should be preventing," said Paynter. "Because we should be preventing harm to children that should be one of our greatest priorities as a society." The authors stress that future research should focus on building more complete, up-to-date national data that 1 of 3includes all provinces, territories and federal prisons. The authors also call for more research on the inequities faced by Indigenous and Black children, including approaches led and governed by Indigenous communities.
CREDIT: Daysha Loppie Toronto Star
