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Back on prisoner voting and dignity

By Jonathan Simor

I'm still pondering the prisoner voting controversy over here (see my last post). At first I thought it was a rather trivial issue, at least to one who is primarily concerned with mass incarceration and the deplorable conditions in many prisons in the US. After all many states of the United States strip prisoners of their right to vote for years after they have been released from prison, while the UK restores voting rights as soon as a prisoner is on parole. But as I've continued to listen to the debate here I find it more and more interesting. Here are some more (somewhat random) observations:Many UK politicians seem to find it so obvious that prisoners should have no right to vote simply because they are prisoners, without regard to the nature of their crime or their overall sentence, that hardly any one has even discussed what a less blanket ban should look like (listen to an interesting interview on BBC Radio's Law-in-Action, with the UK Attorney General on this issue here)...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on March 18, 2011 (boomark / email).