Fantastic! Now my say in the democratic process is worth no more than the average barrister, banker or or insurance salesman.

If an innocent person was wrongly convicted and sent to prison and subsequently their sentence was quashed and they hadn't been able to vote in a democratic society during their incarceration, they would have had a fundamental right taken from them. They would also scream very loudly about this on release.

If I am not a prisoner, guilty of no crime and my right to vote is removed from me then one of my fundamental rights has been removed and I will scream to anything with ears that this is a travesty. (Thus rendering the society I am in to no longer be a democracy).

It is therefore a universal right to vote in a democracy, otherwise there are no rights at all, and no democracy.

If a person has been proven to be guilty of a crime then they are punished for their actions by having their liberty removed from them.

Their other rights should remain intact otherwise the rest of society which removes any other rights is no longer a society.

The right to vote....yes, but conjugal visits no.

I wonder which of the two the average prisoner would prefer, given the choice.

"The criminal fraternity have always been more inclined to the Right"

Never a truer word said Swatantra, they are currently a fraternity 'running' this bloody Country!

Just as a data point, in Canada, in 2002 a Supreme Court ruling on the Charter of Rights recognized the rights of all prisoners to vote. In the past 8 years, we've had a goodly number of elections and the sky has not fallen. Those Canadians who share jeremiah's desire to have prisoners denied the right to vote in order to make 'law-abiding citizens' feelings of superiority over prisoners have learned to cope. The choice of government in Canada has not been noticeably affected. Indeed the current Conservatives who've been winning since 2002 at the federal level are the 'law and order' party.

Folk interested in a canvassing of the issues could do worse than read the Supreme Court decision at http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/2002/2002scc68/2002scc68.html .

In general prisoners should have the right to vote (a postal vote in the constituency in which they were last registered). They are deprived of their freedom, not their other civic rights.

However there should be limited exceptions and Parliament is entitled to define them in law. It has been suggested a conviction for electoral fraud should include deprivation of the right to vote during the prisoner's sentence.

I feel strongly that convicted murderers and those convicted of murder should lose the right to vote during their sentence; after all they have denied their victim inter alia their right ever to vote again.

"Fantastic! Now my say in the democratic process is worth no more than the average drug dealer, mugger or car thief. "

There's a name for that. Democracy.

There are, potentially, a number of reasons why some of those convicted of breaking the law are confined to prison, and that's a debate for another time. But amongst those reasons, surely, must be the need to remove from society those deemed to be a danger to others; or to put it another way, they do not have the best interests of society in mind. If we do not trust them in this regard, why would we trust them to use their vote in the best interests of society?

So, are we to have either:

- elections in several constituencies decided (as the numbers show many ones with prisons in would be) by prisoners i.e. those we have, as a society, determined should be outside society; or

- parliamentary seats for criminals, voted on by criminals.

Both are discomfiting, and I think undesirable. And I don't buy the soggy argument that voting will help reform prisoners one bit. To lean on a hackneyed saying: is it broke? Why fix it?

I disagree with the ECHR's idea of what human rights are. And I'm in good company: the right to vote is not, for example, in the UN's 1948 declaration.

I do not want MPs getting elected on the strength of promises they have made to criminals. And I do not want an "HMP MP" whose authority in the legislature (or even government) would be equal to that of my MP.

I also think it impossible to draw a line between which criminals may vote, and which may not. Many have mentioned murder here, but what about rape and other offenses against the person? In a capital society, what about offenses against property?

Voting is an extension of our liberty as free citizens - we choose your governors. The central precept of democracy is that it is the mechanism by which an individual may exercise power over the state, and thus have liberty - our governors do not rule us.

We adjudge some criminals to have trespassed society, and so their liberty is deprived. A prisoner's liberty, de facto and de jure, is removed.

Given that our society is a democracy, adding removal de suffragium (?) merely completes the prisoner's just loss of liberty. A prisoner is not a prisoner if he can weild the political power of a free citizen.

The idea that prisoners should be allowed to influence our society while being justly kept outside it I think offends the value of the vote, and undermines democratic society.

Another old saying goes: your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.

Similarly, a person's right to influence my democratic society ends where his offence against the precepts of that society begins.

---

A note on how this article is couched, which perhaps offends the old joke that there are two kinds of people in the world: people who divide people into two kinds of people...

DAG's articles increasingly view complex issues through a prism that polarises everything into "liberal" (good) and "illiberal" (bad), without any qualification of these terms. What, for example, would something "slightly liberal" look like?

I hope DAG is not catching fourlegsgoodtwolegsbaditis, a strain of which has long infected some of the writers at the NS.

I would have thought, on joining the NS stable, DAG might have troubled himself with an introductory piece of some sort. I did, however, just read his recent post about blogging on the NS (http://jackofkent.blogspot.com/2010/11/reflections-on-my-recent-new-stat...) in which he suggests that he is writing to a constituency (the Left - his capitalisation) who may not 'get it' when he deals with the subjects of free expression and abuses of power if it trespasses the natives' political sympathies. How patronising!

I for one get it DAG, it's just that your blogs on the fire strikes were wak. They failed to give define any terms of reference, and they failed to meet the spirit of your own definition of liberalism.

Which from your Jack of Kent website is pretty nebulous.

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The Daily Mail future headline perhaps '99% OF CONVICTED PROISNERS VOTE LABOUR'.

They've forfeited their right to vote, whatever the level and nature of their crimes. To suggest its a question of HR is absolute tosh, as is their rehab process. Even those old lags on minor offences should wait 6 months or whatever until released.

To those against this proposal, should people who get caught speeding, or littering be denied the right to vote? After all they've shown they have no respect for the laws of this society.

Hans Castorp might be relieved to know there is an alternative to prisoners votes counting for the riding where they are imprisoned or for a prisoners' constituency. Under Section 251(2) of the Canada Elections Act, an incarcerated elector votes in the riding where they resided before incarceration, or where a spouse or relative with whom they would live but for their incarceration lives, or where they last arrested or last convicted (in that order as they can be ascertained). The result is that prisoners pretty much vote where they'd lived and where they'll likely return upon release and so their votes are spread about pretty much as other folk's are. So far, despite the evident fears of Hans Castorp, allowing prisoners to vote has not had any of the effects he envisions, at least in out here in the former colonies. I'm sure the Mother Country can manage to do at least as well as Canada has.

When I first read that US prisoners lose their right to vote (and have very considerable difficulty getting it back after their sentence, I could hardly believe it, I found it such a shocking idea - and since the UK is following the US example and locking up ever increasing numbers of people (v.Nicola Lacey, "The Prisoners' Dilemma")especially for "crimes" like drug offences, which are not "wrong" in any definable way, just against arbitrary laws, ever more people will lose this right which, as many correspondents have pointed out ("Philip" on 4th November states the case particularly clearly)is not part of mere freedom to walk about.
I can only hope this lamentable state of affairs is remedied soon - I don't live in the UK and was horrified to see that the country on my passport behaves like this!

@HLW - Good point. But surely being caught is only half the story. Committing the act is what counts. Who can say they have never done that ? WOuld they relinquish their right to vote or is it only those who get caught ?
And where do we draw the line as to who gets to vote and who doesn't ?
Anti-social is anti-social. There can't be a convenient cut-off point for certain crimes. No-one gives out points for best or worst crime. It's all or nothing.

That was kind of my point, that we already draw a fairly arbitrary line between which criminals are allowed to vote and which aren't.

Personally I feel the vote should only be witheld for offences such as treason and electoral fraud, so offences directly involving politics, kind of like an ASBO can ban someone from shopping in a certain shop where they have caused problems.

The picture above shows a political prisoner voting, which seems fair enough, as long as that political prisoner was not also guilty of murder or multiple murders.