Criminal justice & punishment
Should Prisoners Have the Right to Vote?
LNAT Section B · Model essay
The essay prompt
Should people serving custodial sentences keep the right to vote in elections? Set out the case for and against, and reach a reasoned view.
The stance
Convicted prisoners should keep the right to vote, subject only to narrow and proportionate restrictions tied to the gravity of the offence; a blanket, automatic ban is indefensible.
The case for
Citizenship is suspended in liberty, not in membership.
Imprisonment removes freedom of movement; it does not expel the offender from the political community. A democracy that defines its people by exclusion undermines its own claim to govern by consent. In Hirst v UK the Strasbourg court warned that any departure from universal suffrage risks the democratic validity of the legislature itself, precisely because the demos is the source of that legitimacy.
The case against
Offenders have broken the social contract.
On a Rousseauian or Lockean reading, a citizen who breaks the law breaches the compact that grounds civic rights, and so may justly forfeit a share in making the law until the debt is repaid. Disenfranchisement marks the moral boundary between those who keep the rules and those who do not.
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