Votes For Prisoners

[KidChameleon]

What are people's thoughts on this?

I don't think I've spoken to anyone yet who supports prisoners having the right to vote. I seem to be the only person who thinks they should be allowed to vote. Voting is a right, not a privilege. If you can pick and choose who gets to do something, it's a privilege.

If someone is locked up for something stupid, like putting their recycling bin out on a Tuesday, then surely they have the democratic right to vote against such an absurd law. If not, why not make it illegal to vote against the political party that's in power? Lock up all the opposition, and luckily they can't vote against you.

I'm surprised Cameron would go so far as to say it makes him feel physically ill to think of prisoners voting. Not everyone in prison is a kiddy fiddling, murderer scumbag.

[TheAnimus]

so your not advocating that kiddy fiddlers or former news of the world journalists should be denied the right to vote. I mean their obviously bad to society.

Its just the crimbos who have a heart of gold who should be allowed too.

It also raises pratical issues, which area should the be voting for? the local they are spending time in, or the area they lived in before.

Its mostly irrelevent, and tbh we have bigger things to worry about, if it saves us money, its as simple as you've been imprissoned, no vote. Having a system which decided that it was only attempted murder, so it doesn't really count is complex.

I hate complexity, so I say **** em.

[[GSV]Trig]

They shouldnt be able to vote imho.

[Spud1]

Sorry but the moment they committed their crime, whatever it was, they gave up their right to vote, along with their right to freedom in our society. The people who break the rules should not be given the chance to make them (or heavily influence them); offering them that right makes a mockery of the whole justice system imo.

It doesn't actually matter what the crime is, or if the person is "good" or not, they still committed a crime, broke the law and are being punished for it.

Of course this assumes that everyone in prison is infact guilty, which we know is not the case, but the vast majority are, so for the purposes of things like this, we have to assume that everyone is and apply the same rules to all.

You're the first person (outside of the crazy EU courts who clearly smoke too much of something with the things they come out with) who actually thinks these people should get the vote - fair enough, you are entitled to your opinion..but I think the vast majority of our population will disagree with you.

It will be incredibly frustrating if it all goes ahead and our country bows yet again to the will of the eu courts, there are some issues like this on which we need to make a stand..

[KidChameleon]

offering them that right makes a mockery of the whole justice system imo.

Not allowing them that right makes a mockery of the whole democratic system, in my opinion. Someone disagrees with you. Lock them up. Problem solved. Onwards and upwards to a dictatorial regime.

Shouldn't the justice system be formed democratically by all citizens? Just because it's the law that everyone should wear clown shoes on the 1st of June or else face the death penalty doesn't mean violators shouldn't be allowed to challenge that law and have it reneged. I know it's hyperbole but there are people in prison for some relatively mild offenses that wouldn't be allowed to vote, and yet there are convicted violent muggers outside prison that would have more rights than people imprisoned for not paying their TV licence fines.

It's not like a few thousand prisoners would be enough to tip the balance to legalise murder and whatnot.

[jackvdbuk]

Sorry but the moment they committed their crime, whatever it was, they gave up their right to vote, along with their right to freedom in our society. The people who break the rules should not be given the chance to make them (or heavily influence them); offering them that right makes a mockery of the whole justice system imo.

agreed, i bet 99% of prisoners doing 2-3 years + do not care or vote anyway.

giving prisoners yet more rights and making the justice system look like a walk in the park for most.

i wonder if they did a poll on how many prisoners care if they vote, the results would be that most couldnt care less.

doing crime to warrant a prison stay = loss of rights (within reason) for that time.

[Spud1]

Thats exactly the point though - they had the right to protest, to say "I don't agree with this", but they chose to completely ignore it and go ahead with their illegal activity (whatever it is). If they disagree with the law there are ways to express it morally, without breaking the law. It may not work, but that doesn't give people the right to break it.

A few thousand prisoners could well make the difference too, but it's part of the principle anyway. The law is pretty clear about what can happen if you break it, and this is part of it.

[badass]

This is a gigantic fuss over nothing. Whilst everyone's furiously debating this, expect lots os legislation that will negatively effect lots of people to be passes without a murmur.
Kind of like the fox hunting bill passed by labour.

[Saracen]

....

You're the first person (outside of the crazy EU courts who clearly smoke too much of something with the things they come out with) who actually thinks these people should get the vote - fair enough, you are entitled to your opinion..but I think the vast majority of our population will disagree with you.
....

Point of clarification .... this is about a European Court of Human Rights judgement and not an EU court. They are different, set up by different treaties and not linked.

It's also worth pointing out that the court hasn't said that all, or even most, prisoners should get the vote.

What it actually objected to was an automatic, blanket ban on voting rights, regardless of any consideration of complicating factors. For instance, we only vote (typically) every four or five years for a general election. So .... suppose you get two people, both sentenced to one week in jail. One of them is in jail when there's a general election and the other is not. The effect of the blanket ban is, arguably, unfair, because it disenfranchises the one party, but not the other, through sheer fluke of timing.

They also complained that the blanket ban bears no relation to length of sentence or the nature of the offence. While it may well be fair to remove the vote from someone who, for instance, murders another with an axe, is it fair to do it for someone sentenced to a short, sharp shock for shop-lifting a pair of jeans? Is is proportionate to do that for the shoplifting, when had the sentence at anything other than that specific critical juncture of when an election occurs, they would not have been disenfranchised?

But probably the court's most damning point was that these factors had not been considered by Parliament and that the law had effectively just come forward from a measure first drafted 150 or so years ago, and did not take account of modern times.

So, the court is really saying ....

1) Parliament should consider it
2) An absolute, blanket ban perhaps has disproportionate effect.

But it ALSO said that it is quite right that national governments should have very wide latitude is determining how to resolve this issue.

The Court accepts that this is an area in which a wide margin of appreciation should be granted to the national legislature in determining whether restrictions on prisoners’ right to vote can still be justified in modern times and if so how a fair balance is to be struck. In particular, it should be for the legislature to decide whether any restriction on the right to vote should be tailored to particular offences, or offences of a particular gravity or whether, for instance, the sentencing court should be left with an overriding discretion to deprive a convicted person of his right to vote. The Court would observe that there is no evidence that the legislature in the United Kingdom has ever sought to weigh the competing interests or to assess the proportionality of the ban as it affects convicted prisoners. It cannot accept however that an absolute bar on voting by any serving prisoner in any circumstances falls within an acceptable margin of appreciation.

From some of the discussion I've seen on this, and I don't mean on Hexus but in some newspapers and even some of the comments on BBC's Question Time, I wonder how many of the people getting steamed up about the Court's judgement have actually read the damn thing, and/or understood quite what it said?

[Saracen]

This is a gigantic fuss over nothing. Whilst everyone's furiously debating this, expect lots os legislation that will negatively effect lots of people to be passes without a murmur.
Kind of like the fox hunting bill passed by labour.

The Fox hunting bill hardly went without a murmur. In fact, it's hard to think of any legislation in recent years that caused more uproar, with the possible exception of the extension of uncharged detention to 90 days ... and maybe even including that.

[capt_cornflake]

The Fox hunting bill hardly went without a murmur. In fact, it's hard to think of any legislation in recent years that caused more uproar, with the possible exception of the extension of uncharged detention to 90 days ... and maybe even including that.

As I understood what he was saying, he meant that the stink that was kicked up over the fox-hunting bill allowed other legislation to be passed without public scrutiny (can't think what off the top of my head though), and that he feared a similar thing would happen here as well.

[ajones]

If I was wearing my executioners cap I'd agree with the sentiment that prisoners should not be allowed to vote. Hell, I'd go further and say that if you've contributed nowt to society and lived off welfare for a considerable portion of your life, then you shouldn't be able to vote either. Change the rule so that instead of having a basic human rite to vote, it should be an earned right.

Removing the cap and calming down; this wouldn't make us the democracy we all enjoy.

It's inevitable that some laws designed to protect the majority will inevitably lead to uses that are deemed unsuitable to some. Just because someone is, how is it phrased above, a kiddy fiddler or murdering scumbag, it does not necessarily follow that they are not intelligent enough to carefully consider who should be running the country and therefore poll an educated vote. I may not like what I'm writing, but I must say that I'm leaning towards the side of the arguament that if you have a right to vote in the UK, then that's enough (with maybe the caveat for crimes against the crown).

However, if you are imprisoned, then why should we spend money bringing the *ability* to vote to you. It's not my fault you can't physically get to the polling booth now is it.... DAMN! how did that cap get back there?

[badass]

As I understood what he was saying, he meant that the stink that was kicked up over the fox-hunting bill allowed other legislation to be passed without public scrutiny (can't think what off the top of my head though), and that he feared a similar thing would happen here as well.

Yep!

[Saracen]

Yep!

Fair enough.

What's passing without a murmur, though, and if it is, is it due to the publicity over this?

For that matter, how important is this issue? And is the issue of prisoner's voting really about prisoner's voting, or is it about what influence an unelected panel of European judges has over domestic legislation, and moreover, whether the Court is seeking to extend it's jurisdiction into matters that it was never intended to be addressing?

It seems to me that, as that latter point seems to be what's got such atypical cross-party support exercising back-benchers in an almost unprecedented way, that at the very least we need to tie down where the court has the right to butt into domestic policy and where it dies not.

After all, the EHCR (and the Court) was set up in the aftermath of World War II, and in the mindset of immediate post-war thinking, and it was supposed to be about ensuring that type types of gross abuses we saw in WW2 could never happen again, at least inside the jurisdiction of the Court, and that if it did, there was a framework and mechanism in place to deal with transgressors.

So, perhaps, the lesson of this saga is that we, the nation states, need to more clearly delineate what the court does have jurisdiction over and when it should mind its own damn business. It does, of course, always remain an option if a politically unpalatable one, that we withdraw from the ECHR altogether and pass our own domestic Bill of Rights.

The ball is now with the government to decide what to do, if anything, legislatively, and what the Court's reaction to whatever those measures are.

But one thing's pretty clear .... Parliament has the bit between it's teeth on this one and isn't in a mood to kowtow to Euro-judges, and if opinion polls are right, they have the massive support of the public for that stance.

It could be an interesting stand-off if the Court decides to push the issue.

[pp05]

Saracen you're right. If the govt have country-wide support I expect William Hague to be a little less embarassed when he is summoned by Brussels to explain. Parliament has the final word in how to get the balance right.

[abaxas]

Of course the government will fight this.

Most inmates would and will vote labour.