Due to Covid-19, all visits to prisons in England and Wales were suspended indefinitely on March 24, 2020. Despite assurances from the Government that steps would be taken to provide alternative ways for incarcerated parents to remain in contact with their children during this time, many prisons have persistently failed to implement appropriate phone-call and video-call programs to support sustained family communication across prison walls. 

Working with Shona Minson, a British Academy Post Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford, Olivia will research the legal, political and social implications of the suspension of prison visits during the coronavirus pandemic. Olivia’s multidisciplinary project is an unsettling of traditional single-history (or even unacknowledged) narratives of communities affected by incarceration. Over 300,000 children in England and Wales are estimated to have a parent in prison. Olivia hopes that this project will simultaneously expose the broader harm caused by parental incarceration — before, during and after the pandemic — and the strength of affected communities to heal, build collective power and drive social change.