Stop prisoners from voting? That's criminal

Stop prisoners from voting? That's criminal

What is it that makes otherwise rational people foam at the mouth at the mention of votes for prisoners?

By Kevin McKenna, The Observer, Sunday 3 April 2011

Kevin McKenna

If we could discover a set of indices to measure a country's degree of enlightenment then Scotland, I'm sure, would be up there with ancient Greece. In this country we extend free care to the sick, the dying and the vulnerable. We strive to give our brightest children a university education without them facing a lifetime of debt for the privilege. Devolution has made the business of political philosophy a bear market. A flotilla of pamphleteers and soothsayers have attached themselves to Holyrood writing treatises on how our lives can be made better. It seems they are on a crusade to ensure that every ounce of our human existence can be examined, codified and explained. Strategies for improvement are always prescribed and these nearly always begin with the words "… if only we had full fiscal autonomy".

Yet in one area of our Scottish existence the nation still clings to medievalism in its approach. Our attitude towards prisoners and penal reform is one that Torquemada would have recognised: find many of them guilty; build more prisons to hold them and make life as uncomfortable for them as possible when they're there. Addressing the House of Commons 101 years ago home secretary Winston Churchill said: "The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the unfailing tests of the civilisation of a country." If that is true then Scotland and the UK as a whole is has hardly emerged from the Jurassic period.

Last week, George McGeogh, a Scottish prisoner currently serving a sentence for murder, appealed to the Court of Session to be allowed the right to vote in the Holyrood election on 5 May. At Westminster, the prime minister, David Cameron, is fighting a rearguard action against the European Court of Human Rights over prisoners' voting rights. It is a battle he is destined to lose as Strasbourg has pointed out something that anyone remotely concerned with human rights will tell you: the UK is grotesquely out of step with the rest of western civilisation on this issue.

Thus Jim Wallace, the advocate general for Scotland, will duly oppose McGeogh's petition on behalf of Westminster. Wallace has form in this area and ought to be wary. Mr McGeogh's solicitor is Tony Kelly, one of the UK's leading human rights lawyers and a man who has already made a fool of Wallace. The two of them faced each other several years ago when Wallace was Scotland's justice minister and Kelly was representing prisoners who were seeking damages under European law for the barbaric practice of slopping out in Scotland's jails. Kelly won that fight and the compensation claims will eventually eclipse the money that Wallace had previously received from Europe to help end slopping out. It was a catastrophic political error that cost the country millions and ought to have ended the minister's political career.

Just what is it about extending the right to vote to prisoners that makes so many otherwise reasonable people foam at the mouth? In the House of Commons last year David Cameron stated that he felt physically sick at the very notion. These sentiments would have been shared by many in the opposition benches. Their response is simplistic and depressingly predictable; that when a citizen commits a crime against society he forfeits the right to take part in that which allows us to regard ourselves an enlightened democracy: the right to elect our government. Yet is there a better way of encouraging prisoners in civilising patterns of behaviour than by allowing them to participate in the political process?

Cameron was elected to represent all citizens of the United Kingdom: the good, the bad and the ugly. His party will legislate on issues that affect prisoners and their victims and, like others before him, he will become aware of the crippling cost to the country of our high rates of recidivism. Yet in Scotland, as in other parts of the kingdom, our penal system is an open invitation to re-offend. How can you even attempt a process of rehabilitation when we treat like animals those of our human beings who have offended?

In Scotland we send a higher percentage of young people to jail than any other country in Europe. This is already in direct contravention of EU law on the rights of the child. A grotesquely disproportionate number of those we lock up are from areas of multi-deprivation and will be afflicted by myriad mental problems stemming directly from poverty.

We jail many of them for relatively minor offences in the knowledge that few of them pose a threat to the public.

We jail more women than our EU neighbours, even though we know that they will be suffering from acutely worse mental ailments than men; much of it linked to physical abuse and grinding poverty. Their treatment inside prison is such that there is virtually no chance of them ever being able to break cycles of violent or dishonest behaviour.

The obscene way we treat these people means that our prisons are in a constant reproductive cycle where the seeds of tomorrow's adult prison population are constantly growing. Many of our prisons have changed little since the Victorian era when they were built. There is little or no access to natural light, exercise or society with other prisoners. Prison food in too many instances falls well below the standards of nourishment that make for a healthy and balanced diet. This cocktail of penal deprivation simply exacerbates the mental health issues that many of our prison population must endure.

Few families in Scotland in the last three generations will not have endured the pain that comes from a beloved relative being sent to prison. In the vast majority of cases the crime will have been born of a complicated mixture of social and emotional factors. We will claim that the crime was out of character or an error of judgment under pressure. Yet our faith in our police forces and in our judiciary lead us to accept that they rarely jail innocent people and that sentencing is just and proportionate.

But when we process these people in our prison system, justice, fairness and compassion depart to be replaced by fear, loathing and cruelty. Very few criminals currently resident in Scotland's jails are truly evil. The way we treat them is.