Should prisoners be allowed to vote?

Erwin James, writing in The Guardian, thinks so, and it doing so, makes an important wider argument about why democracy matters – and how important inclusivity is.

“The lives of the people we imprison are usually unstable and dysfunctional, so much so that that few have ever experienced being involved in the democratic process. The consequent sense of being detached from society is often a cause of much offending. Prison is meant to be physically detaching, the loss of liberty is the penalty perpetrators pay – the loss of freedom, of movement, of choice. But psychological detachment, the sense that prisoners do not belong, do not count and have no value in society – is dangerous when exacerbated by the prison experience. While people are in prison they need to be encouraged to feel that they are still a part of society.”

Voting as an element of personal orderliness. When politics is a battle for a narrow section of the electorate – either the most active citizens, or a particular demographic (in 1997, Labour pinned all of their hopes on winning over Gloucester Woman), the consequences for wider society are potentially damaging.

I saw this clip (below) a while ago, and for me, the most striking thing about it (and admittedly, I’m drawing conclusions from implications, so I’d be happy to be corrected on this) was that only a minority of prisoners were prepared to attend a meeting on voter registration in one of the two US states that allow inmates to vote – and only a minority of those attending decided to actually register. The demand for voting among prisoners appears not to be huge though….