The man of Straw.
According to the Grauniad’s Comment is Free (CiF – sterilises all debates), Jack Straw is “dragging his feet” over prisoners’ voting rights. 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, and cannot be treated lightly; the ECHR’s contention is that the current blanket ban is unfair, not that witholding the right to vote from certain prisoners is in itself unlawful. Straw’s apparent foot-dragging, it seems, has more to do with politics than with sensible prisons policy – although that should surprise no-one, given Labour’s atrocious mismanagement of our criminal justice system.
Labour's model for prison population management.
Today the Prison Service is creaking under the strain of a record population. 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.
For the purposes of punishment and rehabilitation, it is 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 an even greater 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 and lenient sentencing have managed to damage our collective human rights by almost guaranteeing that criminals have neither the inclination nor the opportunity to rehabilitate.
Labour’s problem with prison management goes far, far deeper than any mistake or reluctance when it comes to giving some prisoners the right to vote. The structural problems with rehabilitation, the weakness of the Government’s sentencing guidelines and the diminishing value placed on prison’s function as a punishment all limit or prevent successful rehabilitation and, thereby, prisoners’ ability to regain their civic rights on discharge. The ECHR’s judgement cannot take those issues into account; it is important that the Government is not allowed to forget that its failures go far, far deeper than anything highlighted in Strasbourg.
Filed under: Crime, Justice, Liberty | Tagged: ECHR, Human Rights, Jack Straw, Prisoners, Prisons
Excuse me…?!!!?? Prisoners being given the right to VOTE???!!!
NEVER!
IF you are in Prison for breaking the law, you should NOT expect to have a say in the affairs of the law abiding people you have shown so little respect for!
F**k of Europe! & F**K off Jack Straw!
One of the reasons I’m looking forward to a next possible Conservative government is the British Bill of rights to build upon the ECHR, then we might get some serious dicussion here in Britain.
In fairness to the ECtHR, they did _not_ rule that prisoners should, as a general rule, be allowed to vote, rather that the rules governing disenfranchisement are presently conceived in such a wide and arbitrary sense that they don’t pay any heed to proportionality. (The case is Hirst v UK and the judgement is at para. 41 http://cmiskp.echr.coe.int/tkp197/view.asp?action=html&documentId=787485&portal=hbkm&source=externalbydocnumber&table=F69A27FD8FB86142BF01C1166DEA398649)
For example, if you’re a few days away from release on a minor conviction, is it really fair to impose the bar? On the face of it, possibly, but that would ignore the problems we have in actually getting the deserving out of the door on parole – two people could go in at the same time for the same offence serving the same sentence, exhibit the same degree of remorse and rehabilitation and leave at different times simply because of the administrative burdens imposed on convening parole hearings. One gets released a few days before the GE, the other the day after the GE. Is that really fair when the release owes little to his actual crime?
Also, importantly, on the facts of that case the claimant (Hirst, now released, who blogs over at Jailhouslawyer), was convicted of manslaughter via diminished responsibility (loosely a lesser form of insanity). He had already served the punitive part of his custodial tariff. The only reason he was being retained was because he was viewed to be a threat to the public. The basis of claim was that as he was no longer there to be punished, it was disproportionate to deny him the vote.
You also couldn’t get a ECHR claim against the government for the failures of the prison service, because:
1. The Convention only covers human rights, not economic and social entitlements;
2. The appropriate challenge would be under European Union Law, and it would be a rather federalist move to suggest that prison policy should be within the legislative competence of that body.
As for the Armed Services, well we’ll see some potentially very interesting claims given the decisions earlier this year.
Thomas, we’re unlikely to get a serious discussion on Human Rights here in Britain because most commentators don’t even appear to know how the HRA actually works. How do you propose we “build on” the ECHR?
Let it never be claimed that I do not respond to comments; as Ben pointed out, in trying to make a wider point about Labour’s dreadful failure to get a grip on the prison system I allowed a number of factual and conceptual inaccuracies to creep into my original post. The post has been reasonably extensively re-written to concentrate on my core concern about rehabilitation.