The Ballot Box and the Jail Cell
| Date | 01 February 2011 |
| DOI | 10.1350/jcla.2011.75.1.674 |
| Author | Gary Slapper |
| Published date | 01 February 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Opinion |
The Ballot Box and the Jail Cell
Gary Slapper*
Professor of Law, and Director of the School of Law, at the Open University,
door tenant at 36 Bedford Row
The Prime Minister, David Cameron, recently stated that he felt unwell
at the thought of giving prisoners the vote. He said, ‘It makes me
physically ill to even contemplate having to give the vote to anyone who
is in prison’.1
The government should have better grace in according the right to
vote to some prisoners.
Many people will feel an understandable sense of moral outrage that
a legal case to enfranchise prisoners was brought by Peter Chester,
someone convicted of raping and killing a child. That distressing fact,
however, is a misleading distraction from the key issue because the
enfranchisement of prisoners would not need to include all prisoners,
and almost everyone advocating prisoner enfranchisement in general
would rightly want to keep very serious offenders disenfranchised.
Like all forms of punishment, disenfranchisement should be used in a
measured and fair way. By analogy, of those many MPs found to have
made improper expenses claims, it was rightly never argued by Mr
Cameron that all should be treated with exactly the same severity. Mr
Cameron recognised that while some of his MPs were very dishonest,
others who had made unwarranted claims on the public purse could be
classified as less culpable wrongdoers.
It is logically unsustainable to conclude that because some prisoners
guilty of heinous wrongs should not get the vote therefore all prisoners
should not get the vote.
Prisons contain many bad and dangerous people, but it is silly and
simplistic to say that irrespective of what crime someone has committed,
and for which they have been punished with imprisonment, they
should also automatically lose the vote.
The current prohibition on all prisoners voting is anachronistic.
Other western European countries already give some prisoners the
right to vote. Prisoners ipso...
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