Prisoners and the vote

By Sarah Hayward / @sarah_hayward

I’m delighted that the government has decided to implement the Hirst judgement. We should’ve done it. On offender rights (prisoners and probation) many will want to label me lilly livered lefty liberal but if that’s the case I’ll wear the badge with pride – two years working as head of press for Prisons and Probation cemeneted this view.

So on to voting. At the short sentence end it’s relatively easy (although many will disagree). Two people of the same age, background, mitigating factors, criminal history can commit the same crime on the same date in different areas of the country and be sentenced to a short sentence but because the police and court system investigate and prosecute the sentences at different speeds one offender misses polling day and the other – equally guilty – doesn’t. That’s palpably not fair. And you might not care too much for fairness where prisoners are concerned but if we stop holding ourselves to a higher standard we lose the right to judge. The vast majority of prisoners serve short sentences.

The application of short sentences is also dicated by a similar ‘postcode lottery’. Magistrates and Crown Court judges differ in their outlook and view of both certain crimes and punishments. Whether you end up in prison at all is as much, if not more, a quirk of where you commit the crime as the actual crime you’ve committed.

The latest probation statistics show that around 240,000 offenders are being supervised in the community – these people are eligible to vote if there were an election tomorrow. This pool includes people convicted of the most serious crimes against people – rape, manslaughter and murder – whose sentence has expired or who the parole board has decided can be released at the end of the ‘tarif’ part of their life sentence.

The government have said they’d apply limits. I assume they’ll try and apply some sort of severity test. But John Hirst himself is serving a life sentence for manslaughter and did 25 years of that in prison. The ECHR agrees that his right’s were breached. There’s not that many people in prison on longer sentences. I assume the government are terrified of the stories about Roy Whiting, Ian Huntley and Rose West being able to vote. But people convicted of very severe crimes already vote.

The ruling is clear about arbitrary limits on voting. So I think the only way they’ll be able to do this is legislate to change the sentencing framework to include a ‘loss of voting rights’ element – but even this may not stand up in a court as sentences are supposed to be relevant to the crime.

Fundamentally, I believe that voting is a basic human right. And the ECHR agrees with me. However unpalatable that is. Churchill said you can judge a society by how it treats it’s prisoners. As compassionate human beings we must hold ourselves to a higher standard and we must treat our offenders as human beings.

The sentence is the loss of liberty, everything else should be about rehabilitating prisoner as functioning members of our human society, and voting in elections should be a key part of that.

Sarah Hayward blogs here.