Prisoner Voting
Prisoner Voting
- Scotland should legislate to remove the ban on prisoner voting: voting is too hard-won a fundamental human right to be lost automatically on imprisonment.
- There was no parliamentary scrutiny in bringing in the ban on prisoner voting in 1969, and between 1969 and 2000 the ban even extended to prisoners held on remand, who had not been convicted of any offence. There was questionable justification for the ban at its outset.
- Extending the vote to prisoners is not simply about criminal justice, penal reform or rehabilitation. It is about human rights: creating a universal franchise for all adults in Scotland and ensuring democratic rights for all citizens. The existence of a universal franchise is an important measure of the strength of our democracy and of social equality. Using that measure, Scotland’s democracy currently falls short.
- Imprisonment is the deprivation of liberty alone, and thus nothing which is not inevitable as a result of this should be included in an offender’s punishment. Denying prisoners the right to vote inflicts an additional punishment of ‘civic death’. But, however long their sentence, prisoners are still citizens.
- Disenfranchisement is an arbitrary punishment. Whether a prisoner loses the right to vote depends on a combination of the date of sentencing diet, how long they had previously spent on remand, and on the timing of elections, rather than their sentence or their offence.
- Imprisonment rather than conviction is the determining factor in whether someone loses the right to vote, but decisions on imprisonment are often not clear-cut and do not depend solely on the seriousness of the offence. There is no straightforward divide between the types of offence that attract imprisonment and those that do not; sentencers take many factors other than offence seriousness into account, including the welfare of the offender and which community sentencing options are available in the local area.
- A custodial sentence by itself sets too low a threshold for the loss of such an important right as the right to vote, whilst inconsistencies in decisions about imprisonment support our argument for a lifting of the ban in its entirety, rather than linking it to the length of sentence or type of crime.
- The ban on prisoner voting impacts disproportionately on the most deprived and vulnerable, doing nothing to minimise social inequality.
- Research has shown that reintegration is aided by strong links between prisoners and their local community; such links are one of the ‘hooks for change’ that encourage desistance from crime. Removing the right to vote adds to the dislocation between prisoner and community, and reinforces social exclusion in a way that works against successful rehabilitation.
- Effective rehabilitation is central to addressing the needs of victims of crime. We are prone to seeing the rights of victims and of perpetrators as necessarily conflicting, so that increasing the rights of one group must come at the cost of the other. But respecting the rights of victims, as we should, does not require denying prisoners the right to vote, particularly since there is no evidence that this functions as a deterrent.