Should prisoners have the right to vote?

In the UK current serving prisoners do NOT have the right to vote. It has been suggested that the European Court of Human Rights may declare any general election result null and void if prisoners (currently about 86,000 people) do not have the opportunity to vote in the next election, likely to be May this year.


As someone who works in a prison I would be interested to know what you think.

Terrorists, murderers, rapists and pedophiles definetely not.

Those in for lesser crimes, I.e burglary or robbery where no serious harm came to anyone else, then maybe they could "earn" the right to vote back.

Yes, prisoners should have the right to vote.  Most will someday be released back into society, and from a purely selfish and practical standpoint it is desirable to have prisoners engage given that they're there because the social contract broke down or never existed in their lives.  I would expect that the subset of prisoners who would be shamed (and thus rehabilitated) by losing the right to vote would be far exceeded by those who would be assisted in rehabilitation through fully participating in a social responsibility that they were often disconnected from in their lives outside.  Voting is unlikely to be a cure for criminality, but being informed and participating in debate and carrying out a civic duty can begin to change how at least some of these people think about themselves.

Yes, they should.

[QUOTE]As someone who works in a prison I would be interested to know what you think.[/QUOTE]

Boy, that explains a lot!!!!  Do you work 'on top' or 'on bottom'?

I think that depends on who drops the soap...

personally I dont think they should be allowed to vote.they should lose all civil liberties like voting,tv's,internet and stuff like that once imprisoned.too many do-gooders in authority now looking after the villains making sure they dont lose their 'human rights' and not enough being done for the 'victims' of crime who dont get such luxuries as free meals and free internet and nice weekend breaks at the beach at the expense of the tax payer.

I agree with Grateful Fan on this.  Excluding people from society is hardly likely to promote rehabilitation into society when they are back out.  Also, they are citizens and are being represented by the government, so they need to have a say in that representation.  The point of prison should not be to make people suffer - that is basically for the sake of the rest of society.  We are angry, feel threatened, we want people locked up.  If there was more rehabilitation work done and more work done to help people integrate back into society, there would be less re-offending, and possibly a higher chance of positive participation in society later.  But i dont work in prison.  :)

I think they should be allowed to vote.

But then I think you should collect all the prison ballots and burn them.  I don't want a mass-murderer voting on issues like Health Care or Capital Punishment.  Plus, they can't contribute political donations, so no incumbent would want them as constituents.

nope they should not be allowed to vote

they serve their sentence and probabtion and stay out of trouble for lets say 5 years i can see them earning the right to vote again

they had the right to vote prior to prision and i bet 98.9% never did  so they are not really missing anything nor do i think they care much....

just my 2 cents

Fortunately, we have laws and binding international treaties, more and more of which are beginning to be implemented now, years or even decades after they were signed, that protect all citizens, regardless of their crimes, from arbitrary disfranchisement.

But what does that mean, "arbitrary disfranchisement"? It means withholding the right to vote and hold office from anyone without specific orders from a court. Any crime for which the person sentences goes to prison automatically renders null and void the right to hold office (passive franchise) for the duration of the sentence. The right to vote, however, can only technically be withheld from prisoners if a judge has specifically included a provision for that in the sentence. This rarely happens, because it is a very heavy punishment. Think, for instance, of states with a district system. Since someone who has lost the vote is not technically represented by any district's representative, he (or she) has none to appeal to politically. There are many such difficulties, and for that reason, withholding the vote from someone who would otherwise be eligible is permissible only for a very small number of offenses, such as crimes against the peace (being responsible for the pursuit of illegal warfare under international law), and a number of others I do not know.

no, they should not have the right to vote!
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no, they should not have the right to vote!
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mooghead, as someone else who works in the prison system, i too have wondered about this subject many times in my 30 yrs service.

i came to this conclusion:
90,000 prisoners as a percentage of 40,000,000 million voters is less than 1% of the electorate. when all is considered:-
less than 1% total impact if all vote
most will vote with their backgrounds/traditional/habitual voting
many will not vote anyhow
no major party is likely to ever have a manifesto that favours criminals

so i say, with the virtually unnoticeable affect the extra voters may have - give them the vote

They should have the right to vote, but they should not be allowed to the nearest ballot box.  
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[/QUOTE]In my country, they'd get a fine for not turning up.  Suits me.[/QUOTE]