Let prisoners vote, to remind politicians they are human

Let prisoners vote, to remind politicians they are human

Universal suffrage should mean just that. And as a community, inmates should not be excluded from civic responsibility

By Zoe Williams The Guardian

I'll tell you who was obsessed with prisoner voting rights: the Suffragettes. There's a postcard that contrasts an upstanding woman with a turn-of-the-century badass, remarking: "When once the harmful man of crime/ In Wormwood Scrubs has done his time/ He at the poll can have his say/ The harmless woman never may." There's another postcard complaining about the fact that women can't vote, while ex-cons can, and so can cripples. It's living (well, actually dead) proof of the idea that people who are near the bottom like to kick whoever's underneath them.

Since that neat opposition – the quintessentially harmful man versus the innately harmless woman – was solved by universal suffrage, I think it's fair to say that prisoners' voting rights have troubled nobody, and infringed in no way on the collective consciousness. No private member's bills, no 10-minute rule bills, not a ripple on the surface of parliamentary business, not even when Strasbourg effectively made the UK's position – that no convicted prisoners can vote – untenable in 2005.

Indeed, this is the best single argument for giving prisoners the vote: otherwise parliament takes precisely no notice of them, except in so far as they can promise the rest of us that it'll mete out harsher and more effective punishment. This has led to a total severance between prisons as they appear in mainstream political debate and the way prisons actually work, which is necessarily in the interests of rebuilding the inmates rather than thundering on about what bad people they are.

But besides its impact on the political landscape, this is obviously a profound change to the rights of the prisoner: so the classic arguments about penal philosophy stir on a reflex. Nick Clegg wriggles on the hook of right-thinking outrage, the Mail blames Europe, and the Sun goes further and takes the opportunity to call for MPs to vote themselves – and our fair nation – above the Human Rights Act (to which the only possible response is ah, bless …).

Clegg has made noises, though so far nothing more concrete than a noise, about exempting murderers, rapists, and others convicted of serious violent crime, from the vote. This won't work, not by the terms of the European court of human rights, which since 2005 has refined its position: the principle has yet to be tested in a British case but prisoners can only have their vote withdrawn if they were convicted of a related crime – that is, electoral fraud. It's cute, really – while the coalition struggles to keep suffrage from the most dangerous, the only legal caveat keeps the vote away from the least dangerous.

I'm in favour of prisoners voting: it keeps them moored to society; it keeps politicians mindful that inmates, having votes, are also human beings; prisoners are taxpayers (90% of them smoke); and voting is a duty as much as a right, so there's no reason why they should be exempt from it just because they've exempted themselves temporarily from the other trials of liberty.

The only clear disadvantage would be if, say, they voted en masse as an entire prison, turnout was very high, they all voted the same way, and they were in a swing constituency. But if you take the largest prisons in the UK – Wandsworth and Durham – even if they all turned out, and all voted in the same way, and the young offender institution mobilised everyone who was old enough, it wouldn't come close to making a problem for Sadiq Khan, even with his modest 2,500 majority in Tooting; let alone could Durham cons (sorry, that's "convicts", not "conservatives") put a dent in MP Pat Glass's 7,500.

And actually, the system almost certainly wouldn't work like that: remand prisoners, who are already allowed to vote, are given a proxy vote which they can get a representative to cast for them in the constituency they lived in when they were arrested. It is also unlikely that you'd get anything like 100% turnout; the proportion of the politically engaged would more likely be around one in four (that's an informal estimate, based on the number of prisoners with religious affiliations).

The probable picture is of a minority turnout, spread pretty evenly among constituencies, certainly not forcing a freak event even in the most heavily criminally populated areas. This is good news, not for the string 'em up brigade, but for the social liberals who are so in favour of the restitution of votes in the first place. Prisoners tend to be socially very conservative – conservative enough, in fact, that they probably couldn't find a party in the UK that properly represents them. They're anti-abortion, they're in favour of very heavy sentences (for other people, mind), there's plenty of support for the death penalty among them – they're essentially Melanie Phillips.

And there are good reasons for this: the median age of a prisoner is 23, the peak age of offending is 17. Some 30-40% of any given prison population will have a reading age lower than 10, though this is improving with peer mentoring schemes. It's basically an immature, semi-literate population, and is commensurately rightwing (this doesn't explain Phillips herself, of course).

It would be disastrous for the left if the prison population were large enough and concentrated enough to make a serious difference with their votes. It would be like a Tea Party movement without (and this is no small mercy) the demonstrations. It's the classic Voltaire pact: I hate what you say, I'll defend to the death your right to say it, and (history never relates this crucial last part) hopefully you're not going to take me up on that.