Prisoners: Let them vote

Prisoners: Let them vote

Oct 29th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Even society’s worst offenders should not lose the vote when they lose their liberty



MOST rich democracies spend a lot of time and money trying to convince more people to exercise their right to vote. So it might seem strange that some of the same countries take some trouble preventing thousands of citizens from going to the polls. In 48 American states and seven European countries, including Britain, prisoners are forbidden from voting in elections. Many more countries impose partial voting bans (applying only to prisoners serving long sentences, for instance). And in ten American states some criminals are stripped of the vote for life, even after their release.

There is scant public sympathy for characters such as Peter Chester, a British child-killer whose bid to use human-rights legislation to win the right to vote from his cell was rejected on October 28th (see article). But voting should not require a character test. The punishment of monsters such as Mr Chester consists of the prolonged deprivation of liberty. Withdrawing the vote from them only hammers home what they already believe: that normal social rules do not apply to them.

The antisocial contract

Liberty is by no means the only right to be squeezed in jail, where second-order freedoms such as the right to privacy, to family life and so on inevitably take a battering. To some, the right to vote belongs in this category of minor, unavoidable privations. But it is neither. Those who believe in democracy ought to place the freedom to vote near the top of any list, and consider its removal a serious additional sanction. And losing the ability to vote is no longer a practical consequence of imprisonment, as it may once have been. Voting by proxy or post is easy nowadays; indeed, prisoners awaiting trial in jail (who are not banned from voting in most countries) do so already.

These changes point up the fact that the withdrawal of the franchise is often a hangover of history rather than a carefully thought out sanction. Take Britain, where the ban dates back to 1870 and makes little sense whichever side of the argument one is on. Prisoners may vote if they are doing time for non-payment of fines or, strangely, contempt of court. Those serving the new sentence of “intermittent custody” (which means prison on some days and home on others) may vote if the election falls on a day when they are outside, but not if they happen to be locked up. Prisoners who have done their time but remain banged up for reasons of public protection are still forbidden from voting even though the punitive part of their sentence is over. It is all too obviously a system based on habit rather than principle.

The principles retrospectively volunteered are wrong anyway. Some say that withdrawing the right to vote teaches jailbirds that if they don’t play by society’s rules they cannot expect a hand in making them. But it has yet to be shown that withholding the vote is an effective deterrent against offending. If anything, it is likely to militate against prisoners’ rehabilitation. One of the aims of imprisonment is to give miscreants a shove in the right direction, through job-training, Jesus or whatever does the trick. Allowing prisoners to vote will not magically reconnect them with society, but it will probably do more good than excluding them.

Serving prisoners are not numerous enough to swing many elections. But once a government uses disenfranchisement as a sanction, it is tempted to take things further. Consider those American states where the suspension of prisoners’ votes has morphed into a lifelong ban: in Republican-controlled Florida, for instance, nearly a third of black men cannot vote—enough to have swung the 2000 presidential election. Even those who don’t care much about prisoners’ rights should be wary of elected officials exercising too much say over who makes up the electorate.