WeeklyWorker

11.11.2010

Rehabilitation, not punishment

Communists are vehemently opposed to any prisoner being disenfranchised, writes Jim Moody

The ruling by the European Court of Human Rights to allow some prisoners serving custodial sentences the right to vote has once again brought to light the irrational nature of the penal system in the United Kingdom. At present, those sentenced to serve a prison term lose many rights as soon as the cell door closes behind them. One of those is the right to vote. Its removal was codified in the 1870 Forfeiture Act and continued by Representation of the People Act (1983).

What is the main reason for imprisonment in the UK? According to the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, “It is reasonable to suggest that drug law enforcement is directly responsible for over half of the prison population, although poor data and research means it is impossible to come to a precise figure.”[1] But, as TDPF points out, the UK “has amongst the harshest and most punitive drug enforcement laws in Europe, amongst the highest per capita prison population in Europe and consistently amongst the highest level of drug use and drug deaths in Europe.” It is important to bear in mind, too, that a great many prisoners who are inside for drug offences have not been imprisoned for violence-related crimes. It has to be accepted that many are locked up for victimless or non-violent property crime - clearly people who should not be there in the first place. Imprisonable offences primarily originating with drug possession or dealing, as well as many convictions for burglary and street robbery carried out to fuel expensive drug habits, would not exist were drugs to be decriminalised.

Marxists’ starting point is to see prison as a last resort. Our emphasis must be on prevention. And those who are imprisoned should be deprived of their freedom only; in other respects lives should be as near normal as possible. Above all, we uphold the principle that prison must be about rehabilitation and not punishment. In addition, no prison must be allowed to be run as a business for profit.

Democratising the penal system, as the Draft programme of the CPGB now under discussion proposes, demands workers’ supervision of prisons. It also proposes that in them “prisoners must be allowed the maximum opportunity to develop themselves as human beings”. As part of the rehabilitative process, the draft also says that, “People should only be imprisoned within a short distance of their home locality - if not, families must be given full cost of travel for visits.”[2] After all, why should spouses, parents and children be punished?

Returning to the specific question of voting rights for prisoners, although the European Court of Human Rights decided some five years ago that there should be no “blanket” ban, it took a prod from the ECHR’s enforcement agency, the Council of Europe, this June to convince the Con-Dem coalition to acknowledge, as it did grudgingly, that it had better comply. Current discussions among bourgeois politicians, however, are centred on how circumscribed the right to vote will be, not how to expedite a full enfranchisement: they still want to take the vote away from some, if not most, prisoners.

The US is even worse than Britain. Albeit in a minority of states, those who have served their sentence are denied the vote for life. According to Elizabeth Hull, “In the 2000 presidential election, 4,686,539 Americans - more than 2% of the voting age population - were barred from the polls.”[3] In any event, as a matter of course most states bar prison inmates who have been convicted of a federal or state felony from voting in any election while they are serving their sentence.

Significantly, the 2000 presidential election, which George W Bush won by a whisker, had Florida, a key state, stripping from the electoral rolls “827,307 former prisoners - more than 7% of its voting-age population.” The Sentencing Project reports that, “The racial impact of disenfranchisement laws is particularly egregious. Thirteen percent of African American men - 1.4 million - are disenfranchised, representing just over one-third (36%) of the total disenfranchised population. In two states, our data show that almost one in three black men is disenfranchised. In eight states, one in four black men is disenfranchised.”[4]

Of course, the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. It holds 25% of the world’s prisoners, though it accounts for less than 5% of the world’s population. The US incarceration rate is a massive 737 per 100,000 population (2005), compared to 148 in England and Wales and 139 in Scotland (both 2006) - figures that are themselves shameful by what ought to be civilised standards.

Communists are vehemently opposed to any prisoner being disenfranchised once in prison. In order to provide the greatest chance of rehabilitation, no matter what the crime, a person’s social involvement should be maintained to the fullest extent possible while he or she is in prison. Indeed, prisoners should not only have the right to vote in parliamentary and other such elections, but the right to stand for election too. Put another way, voters should have the right to elect political prisoners. Remember Bobby Sands. He was elected MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone while serving a 14-year sentence in Long Kesh for IRA activity. After his historic April 9 by-election victory Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government saw to it that the Representation of the Peoples Act (1981) barred prisoners serving more than a 12-month sentence from being nominated as an MP.

Naturally, with the Sun, Daily Mail and Express leading the way, Tory Europhobes have lined up to condemn the ECHR judgement. Inevitably, one such was David Davis, the maverick rightwing MP and failed Tory leadership contender, who resigned his Haltemprice and Howden parliamentary seat in 2008 to stand in a by-election for “British liberties” and against the then Labour government’s plans to extend detentions for terror suspects. Now he is demanding that parliament should reject the ECHR decision. For the Blairites, David Green, director of Civitas, the Institute for the Study of Civil Society, joined the rightwing chorus. For him losing the right to vote was part and parcel of a prison sentence and having politicians responding to the concerns of criminals was “the last thing a law-abiding society needs”.

Such reactionary attitudes serve to dehumanise inmates. One recent report[5] indicates that ‘sheeting’ (physical assaults) have become so prevalent and normalised in the privately run HMP Forest Bank, Salford that its staff dismiss it as horseplay and refuse to take it seriously. This is only the latest example of why prisons must be overseen, and when necessary thoroughly investigated, by democratic, working class bodies. Many more cases of inhuman conditions are unreported and apparently officially undetected. Prisons fail society when they fail those within them.

Notes

  1. www.tdpf.org.uk/MediaNews_FactResearchGuide_prisons.htm
  2. www.cpgb.org.uk/pdf/draft_programme_20100211.pdf
  3. E Hull The disenfranchisement of ex-felons Philadelphia 2006.
  4. Human Rights Watch: www.hrw.org/reports98/vote/usvot98o.htm
  5. See, for example, ‘Prisoners suffer bed linen beatings in HMP Forest Bank’: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-11714899