Can I divorce my husband or wife if they are in prison?

Yes, you can. Our family lawyers have handled cases of incarcerated spouses. Imprisonment can sometimes be a fact of life and it does not prevent you from initiating divorce proceedings if you choose to do so.

As long as there is a method of contacting (serving) the incarcerated spouse, the process should continue as a normal divorce. This involves the issuing of a divorce application, serving it on the spouse (to whom is incarcerated in this scenario), them completing an acknowledgement form and the remainder of process will continue as normal.

If the incarcerated spouse fails to complete the acknowledgement form, they can be personally served with the documentation, which would involve a process server attending the prison to hand-deliver the documents to them.  If they still fail to complete the acknowledgement form after being personally served, the court can dispense with their involvement if they are deliberately ignoring the divorce proceedings.

The financial side of divorce proceedings (i.e dividing assets) could be slightly more tricky if the spouse is in prison as they will not have access to their financial disclosure documents to prepare the Form E in the usual way, but there are ways that those issues can be overcome, such as third party disclosure orders sent directly to the incarcerated spouse’s pension provider, as one such example to overcome this issue. 

If you wish to discuss your situation or any issues raised in this blog our family solicitors are based in Wolverhampton, Cradley Heath and Sutton Coldfield and serve clients across the West Midlands.  For all new enquiries, please call 01902 328 355 or complete our online enquiry form and a member of our team will respond.