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Prisoners’ votes – ECHR wrong about rights
Posted by Tory Rascal (@toryrascal)
Monday, 30th November 2009
According to the Grauniad’s Comment is Free (CiF – sterilises all debates), Jack Straw is “dragging his feet” over the idea that all prisoners should be given the right to vote. This stems from a European Court of Human Rights judgement declaring that Britain’s ban on all prisoners’ having the right to vote is unlawful.
When someone is sent to prison, he forfeits a number of freedoms – freedom of association and freedom of movement are the two most obvious. The right to vote, though seldom noted, is another serious forfeit. Deprivation of liberty serves a number of purposes – it deters (or should deter) would-be criminals, it satisfies the public’s need for justice, and, most importantly, it keeps criminals away from the society that they have harmed. Punishment matters.
I’m not on board with the ‘throw away the key’ brigade, however, and I truly believe that the key to a successful penal system is in finding the right balance between punishment and rehabilitation. At present the Prison Service is creaking under the strain of a record population, and this is harming rehabilitation. Labour should have built more prisons to cope with the increasing number of inmates, but it ducked the job and instead chose to recommend increasingly short and ineffective prison sentences. The outcome is a prison system that cannot rehabilitate criminals, either because they have to be moved from pillar to post to make room for new lags, or – worse – because they never get to prison at all, instead being offered inappropriately lenient community sentences.
Whatever the trendy-wendy left-wing intelligentsia would have you believe, tough sentencing matters. If we believe in rehabilitation and punishment, it is clearly important to ensure that prisoners have sufficient time in one place both to be able to learn new skills and to reflect on their crimes. At present, long-term prisoners are too often moved from place to place without the opportunity to establish a long-term training strategy to prepare them for release. Prisoners who are sentenced to less than 12 months are at a significant disadvantage, since training resources simply do not target them effectively – and, of course, they are back on the streets so soon that bad habits and criminal associations are unlikely to have been broken. Overcrowded prisons have managed to damage our collective human rights by almost guaranteeing that criminals do not have the inclination or the opportunity to rehabilitate.
All too predictably, the ECHR has never passed judgement on Labour’s record on prisons; it has never noted the structural problems with rehabilitation, nor the weakness of the Government’s sentencing guidelines and the diminishing value placed on prison’s function as a punishment – even though these all limit or prevent successful rehabilitation and, thereby, prisoners’ ability to regain their civic rights on discharge. All it does is recommend new right after new right for people who should know that they place their freedom in jeopardy when they offend against society, guaranteeing that prison is increasingly seen as an occupational hazard for criminals, rather than as a place where they are given a chance – and an incentive – to convert into decent people.
It seems to be to be clear that, in a society where prisoners are handed more money for ‘human rights’ claims than soldiers receive for injuries due to bad training or decidedly dodgy wars, we are at risk of forgetting both the ethical and the moral dimensions of a criminal justice system. Sort out prisoners’ responsibilities and rehabilitation – then we’ll talk about rights.
