Campaign launched to give prisoners the vote
A new campaign has been launched to overturn the 135-year old law preventing prisoners from voting.
The Prison Reform Trust and ex-offenders’ organisation Unlock argue that removing prisoners’ voting rights does not act as a deterrent from committing crime and that awarding prisoners with the franchise would encourage them to act more responsibly.
Bobby Cummins, chief executive of Unlock, said: “Giving prisoners the vote is a question of moral conscience not political conscience.
“If prisoners are excluded from voting then we don’t have a democratic society, we are just paying lip service to one.”
The campaign is also backed by a group of think tanks and crime reduction societies. James Graham, campaigns officer for the New Politics Network, said that imprisonment should deny an individual only their liberty, not their citizenship.
“It is hard to see what is achieved by denying prisoners the vote: it is neither a serious punishment, nor does it significantly change the result in a single constituency. But it does send out an unfortunate message that prisoners are not part of society,” he said.
“If rehabilitation is to mean anything, we need to move on from this sort of spiteful pettiness.”
The campaign has backing across the political sphere from former Conservative Home Secretary Lord Douglas Hurd, Liberal Democrat president Simon Hughes and Labour peer Lord Corbett.
Earlier this year the European court of human rights ruled that the UK’s removal of voting rights was in contravention of prisoners’ human rights. But the Government is set to appeal against this ruling in April.
It argues that those who have committed serious crimes forfeit their right to have a say in how society is governed.
