Prisoners to get the vote

The Government is this week preparing to concede in a legal battle with the European Court of Human Rights to allow prisoners to vote.  

The move will bring about a change to the law that prohibits voting by the more than 70,000 inmates of British jails.

Although the government would like to keep the ban in place, the Coalition will concede as going against the court would be at the expense of overriding a 2004 ECHR ruling and cost UK taxpayers hundreds of millions in litigation and compensation fees and costs.

Decisions about the process to replace the 140 year old ban, its implementation, and which inmates will be given the right to vote are yet to be thrashed out.

In the meantime, the outcome of the Coalition Government’s decisions will impact on BME communities, because yet again, disproportionality is at the heart of the issue. More than a quarter of Britain’s prison population is from ethnic minority and Muslims groups.

Equality and Human Rights Commission report figures showed that:

- Black prisoners made up 15% of the prisoner population against 2.2% of the general population

- The proportion of people of African-Caribbean and African descent incarcerated in the UK is almost seven times greater to their share of the population.

- That five times more black people than white people per head of population in England and Wales are imprisoned.

And  that there is greater disproportionality in the number of black people in prisons in the UK than there is in the United States’.