A prisoner is a person who is kept in the prison for either being suspected of any crime committed by him or is undergoing punishment for any unlawful act. Further before coming to any conclusion about whether the prisoners should be given a chance to vote in the process of elections or not it is important to first understand the psychology of a prisoner. Being a defaulter at upholding the rules and norms of the law, goes without saying what kind of choices a prisoner or the majority of them would make for the betterment of society.
Moreover, what kind of choice can you expect that a murderer or a rapist, or a thief will choose their representative. Thus, Section 62 5 of the RPA correctly restricts the prisoners to vote in the elections and needs no amendment. LawSikho has created a telegram group for exchanging legal knowledge, referrals, and various opportunities. You can click on this link and join:. Follow us on Instagram and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more amazing legal content. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
Check your mailbox for the joining link. From Bhawna Agarwal: [email protected]. Sign in. Password recovery. Forgot your password? Get help. Home Prisoners The right to vote for the prisoners. Table of Contents. Transphobia in Indian prisons : the distressing truth. Rights of prisoners during Covid : A study of the laws applicable in India and other countries. Need for reforms in prison rules. Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here. You have entered an incorrect email address! Powered by iPleaders. This, however, is not the logic followed in the U. Feldman believes that only a few crimes, such as voter fraud or election tampering, ought to disqualify someone from voting.
In recent years, activists on the left have built a movement for voting-rights restoration. The legislatures of Kentucky, New Jersey, and Louisiana have restored voting rights for large numbers of formerly incarcerated people; Democratic governors, and occasionally Republican ones, have used their clemency powers to do the same.
But these efforts seldom aim for universal suffrage. When advocates in Florida proposed a voting-rights-restoration amendment to the state constitution, in , they excluded people on probation or parole and those who were convicted of murder or sexual offenses. After the amendment passed, with sixty-four per cent of the vote, Republican state legislators passed a bill to lessen its impact , requiring potential voters to pay court-imposed fines and fees before they could cast a ballot.
Many people—including Hillary Clinton, who supports voting rights for former but not current prisoners—tweeted back at DeSantis to say that voting is not a privilege but a right.
DeSantis later blamed his staff for the tweet. Americans generally assume that they have a right to vote, but that right is not explicitly guaranteed by the Constitution. But the Supreme Court has continued to defer to states when it comes to the regulation of elections—a legacy, in part, of the original drafting of the Constitution. Was the fragile new federal government really going to tell South Carolina that free blacks could vote?
Or was it going to have to do the opposite and tell Massachusetts, which did allow blacks to vote, that it would have to stop? Easier to let state laws and provisions dealing with the vote stand. Two centuries ago, only Connecticut barred citizens with criminal convictions from voting. Then, in the decade after the abolition of slavery, while the national movement for black suffrage was building momentum, ten more states, mostly in the South, quickly adopted them.
The same period saw a sharp increase, in many states, in the incarceration of African-Americans. Although the vast majority of people in prison cannot vote, the census counts them as living where they are incarcerated, shifting political representation to the places that have prisons. Many state lawmakers were explicit about the racist motivations for these changes. In , Alabama Democrats, who had a history of election tampering, called a convention to rewrite the state constitution.
Knox, the president of the convention, said in his opening remarks. The same document discriminated against black voters with poll taxes and literacy tests.
Felony-disenfranchisement laws spread across the country: by the nineteen-seventies, forty-six states had them. Massachusetts was the last state to join the group, passing a constitutional amendment in with more than sixty per cent of the vote.
In Tennessee, where citizens lose the franchise for life if they are convicted of crimes such as forgery, sodomy, or receiving stolen property, a fifth of African-Americans are barred from voting, according to the Sentencing Project.
The same was true in Virginia and Alabama until recently, when the Democratic governors of those states restored the franchise to large numbers of citizens. Vermont and Maine, the only states that have never disenfranchised prisoners, are also the whitest states in the nation.
Less than four per cent of Vermonters, and less than five per cent of Mainers, are people of color. Maine has not been entirely immune from peer pressure, though: between and , legislators in Maine proposed bills to restrict voting from prison on six different occasions. Gary Knight, a Republican former member of the Maine House of Representatives, led the last of these efforts.
He recalled that several people had been murdered in his area of Maine, and after speaking to the families of the victims, he was disturbed that those responsible were still allowed to vote. Representation is demanded. All voices count. In April in India, three law students filed a public interest litigation PIL in the SC, seeking right to vote for the prisoners and an amendment to the Representation of Peoples Act, While this case will take its course in the coming months, it is important for us to reimagine the future of the criminal justice system in our country.
Do we want a retributive system, where citizens are condemned and forgotten, or should we aim for a reformative system which aims to improve the structure of society, nurturing the law-breakers and integrate them back to the society?
Right to vote for prisoners is one step towards shaping our criminal justice system into a caring, and reform-oriented institution, one that abides by the universally accepted human rights values. While there is no official collection of data that indicates a clear pattern of the right to vote for prisoners of all the countries in the world, a report in the BBC lists 18 European countries which have given full voting rights to all prisoners. In addition, Slovenia also gives the right to all its prisoners to vote Liberty The Irish government, in , gave all its prisoners the right to vote without any public outcry demanding for it, without any media controversy, or judicial decision.
Ireland adhered to its human rights commitments learning through the best international civil rights practices of providing right to vote to all citizens including prisoners Behan In the majority of jurisdictions surveyed in another study, undertrials are allowed to vote but there would be a blanket ban on convicted prisoners, for example, in the United Kingdom UK , New Zealand Penal Reform International In others, there are limitations related to severity or type of offence Germany bars those convicted of terrorism charges , number of years sentenced Australia, where those sentenced for three years minimum cannot vote Australian Electoral Commission.
In countries like France, there is no default ban on prisoners to vote in the elections, rather the court may decide to disallow any convict on a case by case basis.
In some countries like Italy and some states of the US, convicts can lose the right to vote even after their release BBC Countries around the world have a consensus that undertrial and detained prisoners who have not yet been proven to have broken any law as per the court, are to be treated innocent and hence eligible to their rights. Extending this right to those prisoners who have been found guilty of breaking the law is what is being resisted by various countries in different degrees.
Cormac Behan in his book, Citizen Convicts: Prisoners, Politics and the Vote has summarised the arguments for and against the prisoners right to vote in the following manner:. Prisoners have broken the social contract and have voluntarily put themselves outside the social order. To disallow those who have broken laws to engage in the political process shows how much respect society has for laws. Most of these restrictions do not exist anymore, except for voting rights Behan In modern democracies, the rule of law is the primary instrument of the social contract.
So, when a lawbreaker voluntarily breaks the law, he or she chooses to go outside the society. Therefore, he or she should not be given the rights which a law-abiding citizen enjoys. A lawbreaker has broken the trust, and hence should be excluded from the governance. Denial of voting rights will give a signal of disapproval from the society and will act as deterrence.
Those who had breached the basic rules of society of the right to have a say in the way such rules were made for the duration of their sentence. Convicted prisoners had breached the social contract and so could be regarded as temporarily forfeiting the right to take part in the government of the country. These arguments are further stretched to say that those who have broken the law and trust are corrupt and a process in a democracy as important as of voting, it should not be allowed to get impure or contaminated by their involvement.
Another argument is that those who have broken law are punished with denial of rights including right to vote, apart from being confined in a prison. When the right to vote was being argued against in a Canadian court in the case of in Sauve v Canada, following reasons were given to deny prisoners' right to vote Mbodla :. Article 21 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights UDHR provides that everyone has the right to take part in the government of their country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
Every citizen shall have the right and the opportunity, without any of the distinctions mentioned in article 2 [i. In addition, the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners and The Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment, stress that prisoners should be treated with inherent dignity, that imprisonment is for their reform, rehabilitation and reintegration to the society and hence prisoners should continue to participate in sociopolitical activities.
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