Criminals to Get the Vote as a Human Right

The European Court of Human Rights has decided that a blanket ban on giving prisoners the vote is a denial of their human rights,

More than 28,000 prisoners are to win the right to vote, new figures showed yesterday, as David Cameron faces a growing revolt from the Tory right against the lifting of the 140-year-old ban on inmates voting in British elections.

Crispin Blunt, the justice minister, announced that 28,770 prisoners serving sentences of up to four years will be given the right to vote. The figures include 5,991 prisoners convicted of violent offences and 1,753 inmates convicted of sexual offences.

The government revealed the change last year in response to a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg six years ago that a blanket voting ban on convicted prisoners in British jails was unlawful.

Immediately as Cameron decided this, the issue became one of national sovereignty and why the European Court should enforce what Norman Tebbit today called, in the Guardian of all places, an affront to democracy and "judicial imperialism" by the EU.

But the other issue is even if the ECHR has decreed against banning prisoners voting, that still does not necessarily make it right and that people in Britain should simply accept it and not challenge the nature of the ruling.

The question of votes for convicted criminals in British jails has never been put to the British people. There was originally no need for legislation: as prisoners were not normally resident at a home address when the electoral lists were made up, they were not eligible to vote, nor could they have got to the polls and they did not qualify for postal votes.

Tebbit simply juxtaposes national sovereignty and the wishes of the British people against the EU. But Dianne Abbot then piped in with this,

The logic of Norman Tebbit's argument is that governement could take away the vote of anyone the ruling party happened not to like.

Criminals have human rights too, and logically that involves the right to vote. There is a debate to be had about how exactly that right is extended. For instance, if every prisoner on the Isle of Wight was enabled to vote in that single constituency, it would have a distorting effect on the franchise. But the principle seems straightforward enough.

Furthermore it is precisely the Norman Tebbit style narrative, which implies that all prisoners are subhuman, which makes it so hard to argue for genuine prison reform and effort around mental health issues (a substantial proportion of prisoners have mental health problems which go untreated) which might give us a chance of genuinely rehabilitating the people who pass through our prison system.

Tebbit nowhere implies that. Criminals have the right not to be beaten or tortured as well as the right to appeal. They already have such rights and nobody in their right mind would think of depriving them of these rights. But obviously criminals do not have the right to live with a family, to be at liberty and so on.

Why Abbot should think that criminals having rights means they "logically"should have the right to vote does not at all follow. Lunatics cannot vote. Nor can children, despite politicians using arguments that could just as well appeal to them such is their level of condescension and puerile public relations speak and soundbites.

Prisoners should not be able to vote for as long as they are in prison because they are criminals. By committing crime they have broken the rule of law upon which society depends for security and liberty and should have no say in how it is governed until released.

Rights are not abstract things to be laid down by decree but they are exercised within a social setting and found through reference to case law and precedents decided upon by judges.For society to operate, rights must come with with the responsibility to honour the rights of others.

This a criminal necessarily forfeits on being found guilty of committing a crime as he breaks the social contract either by disregarding the rights of other individuals or by attacking the social compact agreed by consent through the rule of law, decided upon by courts and Parliament.

By committing a crime, the right to vote MP's into Parliament that makes those laws is suspended until the prisoner comes out of prison and is no longer serving a criminal sentence. This is also connected to the idea the idea of punishment, of losing something that was once had as the consequence of doing something harmful and bad to others.

The reason is partly an ideology in which liberals feel squeamish about the notion of punishment at all, as if this were itself barbaric . The aim of punishment should be atonement, the working through from guilt to a new life by being made to understand the bad and harm they have caused.

That means not inflicting pain on the convict which is mere vengeance and retribution . But it means taking away certain rights, such as the right to vote, that others who play by the rule of law and do not commit crime should have by right. This is in accordance with natural rules of fairness.

The notion of rehabilitation divorced from punishment, that criminals have simply broken 'social norms' and need to be made to function normally again by being given the necessary skills to cope with society is part of a crude utilitarian creed in which questions of good or evil are extruded completely.

This inability to accept the notion of wrong doing or evil is one reason why crime levels are high.

If committing crime merely means a person goes to a different place where they are restricted in order to protect the public, without there being a substantial deprivation of the rights inside that others enjoy outside beyond liberty, then the sense that person is being punished for doing wrong is taken away. It makes prison a security detainment centre.

Abbott also claims,

...it is precisely the Norman Tebbit style narrative, which implies that all prisoners are subhuman, which makes it so hard to argue for genuine prison reform and effort around mental health issues (a substantial proportion of prisoners have mental health problems which go untreated) which might give us a chance of genuinely rehabilitating the people who pass through our prison system.

The question of which human rights prisoners i.e convicted criminals have, is avoided by Abbot, as the intent is to score cheap political points as opposed to engaging at any intelligent way with arguments over which rights can be legitimately abrogated on having been found guilty of committing a crime

Tebbit nowhere states that prisoners can be bullied or attacked at will ( though they are by other prisoners ).

As is evident from here concerns for the disproportionate result of a prisoner vote on the Isle of Wight, Abbot thinks that prisoners have the human right to vote only in so far as they do not affect the outcome of voting. Perhaps voting does not really matter that much anyway if it cannot yield the correct results so there is no real point in depriving criminals of the vote

If criminals on the Isle of Wight have as much of a human right to vote than those outside prison it is irrelevant whether that would "distort" voting patters. Why "distort" ? After all, by her logic prisoners are no different from those who do not break the law in all respects with regards human rights and are just living in another place

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Denis Joe offers a good assessment.

It would be more purposeful to look at the this question in the wider context of how society has changed, especially under the NuLabour government.

Today’s Britain resembles, more, an open prison than an actual free society. The constant surveillance of the population, compounded by petty local laws, that dictate where and when we can drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes walk our dogs, etc. The constant demand that we should justify ourselves whether having to show ID at the supermarket when buying alcohol or having to have CRB checks before we can even be considered for a (paid or voluntary) job.

The constant hectoring from TV celebs, Charities and Government departments on what we should eat or how we should bring up our children. All this has contributed toward a society that is unfree.

So, in effect, the blurring between society and an institution like prisons, is understandable.

But that is not to excuse it.

The other side of the coins illustrates the contempt that the establishment holds its citizen in. The need to justify ourselves means that we are all criminals until some (unaccountable) agency says otherwise. The idea that prisoner should vote diminishes the importance of the act of voting. It seems to suggest that voting is simply a mechanical process and not the illustration of a free and open society.

Prisoners have broken the rules of society, and therefore their rights are taken away from them for a period of time. That not only means the right of free movement (even though that cannot be said to exist within society) but also other rights, such as the right to vote. Once a person is released and is back into society then those rights are restored.

To allow prisoners the right to vote makes a mockery of democracy. the fact that this ‘right’ exists in other European countries, does not make it correct.

Crime and Punishment in the United Kingdom

Journalist Neil Clark has written in the First Post that,

Justice Minister Kenneth Clarke's dramatic reversal of the Tories 17-year-old 'Prison Works' policy has not only left grassroot Tories fuming: it's upset Labour too.

Writing in the Daily Mail, former Home Secretary Jack Straw accused Clarke of returning to the flawed liberal "hand-wringing approach to crime", which marked a succession of post-war Home Secretaries before Michael Howard.

Straw praises Howard, a one-time bogeyman of the liberal left, for ushering in a new get-tough era where an increased number of offenders were sent to prison and, according to Straw, crime rates consequently declined. Now it seems those days are gone.

While David Cameron tries to persuade Tory voters that not much has changed, there's no denying that Kenneth Clarke's anti-prison pronouncements amount to a massive U-turn.

As yesterday Daily Mail's editorial reminded us, during the election campaign, the Tories repeatedly spoke of the need to put more offenders behind bars and pledged to create 5,000 more prison places.

Building more prisons is an expedient measure reflecting a deeply dysfunctional society in Britain which coincides with its neoliberal forms of doctrinnaire political economy. The larger picture is always omitted from tabloid sensationalists and smug liberal-left 68ers

The Elite, living a life apart from most ordinary people, play politics with crime in the UK to get support via the media by playing 'tough on crime' when necessary. Or as Blair's lame soundbite had it "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime". It was hollow rhetoric

For in the long term neoliberalism and cruder utilitarian ideas encourage crime as they see it either only as the product of the environment or as intentional Evil. That depends on what political line is to be taken as attitudes to crime have been based on expedient political gain since the 60s.

The Power Elite in Britain ( the "liberal -left) are uninterested in victims of crime as it rarely affects those protected behind gated communities. They make a fuss just to grab votes. As Anthony Burgess made clear in his A Clockwork Orange.

Yet the rapacious criminality of the elites , the tax evasion and flouting of the rule of law for material gain encourages gangsters to feel they are less powerful versions of the same. In Yeltsin's Russia or Latin American states where oligarchs rule this is the norm.

That plus criminal psychopathologies unleashed by nihilistic ideas, an environment increasing dehumanised and alienating and the state being itself tainted with criminality hardly encourages virtue as opposed to vice.

Dostoevsky knew that when he wrote Crime and Punishment in 1866 after retuning from Western Europe. No mere reactionary conservative as often depicted, he remains a master of criminal psychology.

Think about ultimate crimes of terrorism. Blair was more or less driven by psychopathological drives, the idea that as a Napoleon, as with Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, he could make sacrifices of human beings to attain a goal in which more lives might be saved.

This was done with the consent of those who commit state crimes in the view that state sanctioned murder, not as defence as a last resort, is a historical necessity. Raskolnikov discovered he had a conscience after murdering the useless pawnbroker who stood in the way.

Blair only knows how he feels about deceiving the British public about the invasion of Iraq which has led to 1.3 million dead. But his view that by smashing away the old Iraq, with a quick dash of the blood it would incur, was nihilistic. God was Success. And he was a God.

Those who convince themselves of their own delusions are dangerous. Blair never exactly lied. He believed deception was a route to a Higher Goal. Much greater evil flows from that rather than mindless brute violence.

Yet as Dostoevsky makes it clear psychopathological strongmen can also delude themselves that what they are doing is really for the good of the people. Not even the Evil like to think of themselves as Evil. Even that is too much for them to bear.

Moreover, as Dostoevsky found out in Siberian exile in the Tsarist labour camp, simple psychopaths can have a spark off a potentially rekindled moral sense that those who clothe themselves in ideological rationalisations do not as he made clear in Memoirs from the House of the Dead.

As regards prison the liberal-left's crude idea that man is a function of his environment is bound to create an upsurge in criminal pathology, as it means an individual can blame it on his genes or background. By "leftist" this refers to the 68er generation of cultural radicals.

Wise conservatives know that in man in the inherent capacity for evil. Prisons are there to reform but must have an element of punishment in them: people need to suffer, though not by physical cruelty. Meaningful work, education, stern admonition and deprivation of TV are essential.

The liberal-leftists of the 68er generation ( not traditional social democrats or Old Labour ) tend to see crime in stopgap protective terms: not as crime which deserves punishment. Prevention is a pragmatic measure. Uncruel punishment has atonement as its goal

But as for outraged and seething Islamist terror cells, their members can simply witness the deceptions of the British state and turn to nihilism-"if they can do that, then nothing we can do can rival it in criminality"

So they plot and hatch schemes. London has always been a place of violent confrontation, plots,riots, uprisings and crime. It was reaching epidemic proportions in the eighteenth century when the elite from Walpole onwards was a venal, corrupt and rapacious elite.

Highwaymen saw them as moneybags to be thieved from in their stagecoaches. That's why in London lore, those like Dick Turpin and other criminals had an element of popular support as they made their way to Tyburn to be hanged.

For the eighteenth century had a rentier finance capitalism which had higher crime rates and equally draconian punishments. Thatcher brought that aspect of British history back once more by destroying life opportunities for millions through destroying gainful employment.

Thatcher destroyed nineteenth century Britain and the attempt to overcome the horrors of early industrialisation and dispossession. Labour politicians believed in the dignity of labour not just in using working men as a means to an end and in terms of exchange value on the market.

The return of an unstable hire and fire "free" market economy dominated by monopolising huge corporations who dictate policy to the nation state explains the erosion of trust in British public life.

It encourages the collective action problem which is precisely this: the feeling amongst some that if "they" can "get away with fraud , tax evasion etc ,there's absolutely no reason why less powerful individuals cannot do so too if it puts them at a comparative disadvantage.

This is why we are where we are now. And it breeds criminality, a decline in civic responsibility and the older idea held in common before the 60s that we are free beneath the law so long as the state does not interfere too much in our lives where it is not necessary to do so.