Which Prisoners can Vote on 4 July?

 

The General Election on 4 July 2024 is the second since the UK settled the prisoner voting cases in the European Court of Human Rights. In the Hirst group of cases, the Court found that the blanket, automatic restriction on all convicted prisoners voting in parliamentary elections violated Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 to the European Convention on Human Rights which requires that elections ensure the free expression of the opinion of the electorate in the choice of the legislature. 

After years of toing and froing, in November 2017 then Justice Secretary David Lidington somehow managed to satisfy the Council of Europe that some very minimal administrative reforms brought the UK into compliance. Voting rights were extended to prisoners released on temporary licence (so-called ROTL) who are in the community on the date of an election. Lidington estimated this would affect up to 100 convicted prisoners but at the time of the 2019 election I thought the number might in practice be at the low end of the range.

This will be the first General Election since the Prison Service published its “Restrictions on Prisoner Voting Policy Framework” in 2020 which sought to clarify the position. So where does this leave prisoners’ rights to vote on 4 July?

As before the Hirst cases, remand prisoners (both untried and convicted but unsentenced) will be eligible to vote- there were 16,458 at the end of March 2024 (considerably more than the 9,512 at the end of September 2019).  

Prisoners released under Home Detention Curfew (2,169 at the end of last week) also have the right to vote as do those detained for matters such as non-payment of council tax or contempt of court. There were 412 non- criminal prisoners at the end of March, but the figure may include people held under the Immigration Act who do not qualify to vote.  The small number of fine defaulters in jail are to be also able to vote if they wish.

To get an idea of the numbers subject to release on temporary licence who may be eligible to vote, 4,500 individual prisoners were on ROTL at some point during the last three months of 2023, but the numbers in the community on the dates necessary to register and to vote will be much lower- hence Lidington’s estimate of less than 100.  

In addition, there are an unknown number of prisoners in the community subject to end of custody supervised licence, the emergency early release provision introduced and extended to cope with overcrowding pressures. As things stand, they seem ineligible to vote but arguably should be allowed to.  

Eligibility is of course only one part of the story. In order to cast their ballot, an eligible prisoner must register to vote, in this case by 18 June. Some may already be registered. For those who wish to register, the Prison policy makes clear that “no convicted prisoner can register to vote when they are in prison, including those who anticipate being on HDC or ROTL at the time of an election. Prisoners on HDC or ROTL are only eligible to register to vote once they are in the community and become ineligible again upon any return to prison”.

As for where they register vote, some eligible prisoners may be able to register to vote at their home address, others by making a declaration of local connection based on having a significant link to a particular locality. Eligible prisoners may be able to register to vote giving the address of the prison establishment where they are held, but this does not apply to prisoners on HDC and ROTL. Whether or not prisoners are able to register in these ways will be subject to the discretion of Electoral Registration Officers, the Council officials who maintain the electoral roll.

Once these hurdles are crossed, there is the voting itself. Convicted prisoners on HDC and ROTL who have registered can vote in the normal way or apply for a postal or proxy vote. Remand, civil prisoners and fine defaulters can apply to vote by post or by proxy from prison. Staff should ensure relevant application forms for absent voting are available to prisoners if requested.

There is nothing in the Policy Framework about whether prisoners can vote in person in prison. There is a strong case for the ERO to make such arrangements, particularly in prisons with large numbers of remand prisoners. Wandsworth has more than 600 remand prisoners. I’d be interested to know the practice.

For those interested in the topic, a useful article on The Administrative Disenfranchisement of Prisoners in England and Wales was published in the Prison Service Journal last year.

A School and a Prison

 

In the famous words of Victor Hugo, “he who opens a school door closes a prison”. What would he have made of Oasis Restore the first secure school formally opened this week and soon to take its first detainees /pupils? After all it’s both an educational and custodial institution, but one which for Oasis founder Steve Chalke represents "a revolution in youth justice.”  

Its more than eight years since Prime Minister David Cameron talked of turning existing Young Offender Institutions (YOIs) into high quality schools, and five years since Oasis won the tender to run the first of them. Delays have resulted from the need to put the right legal arrangements in place – even now there’s legislation going through Parliament - and to spend upwards of £40 million to remodel the old Secure Training Centre at Medway.

In the meantime, existing YOIs and STC’s have for the most part struggled badly with Rainsbrook STC closing in 2021 and Cookham Wood YOI this year, urgently justifying the case for a new approach.

Secure Childrens Homes (SCH) have fared much better. To my mind, expanding conventional SCH places might have been a more cost effective, quicker, and less risky option than creating an entirely new hybrid model delivered by an organisation with no experience of running secure care. But we are where we are.

While there’s much to applaud in the educational and therapeutic aspirations of those involved, the Medway Secure School follows in a long line of institutions that have promised to turn around the lives of the most troubled and troublesome young people yet mostly failed to do so.  The road to penal hell is paved with good intentions. But we should all wish the Secure School well as it offers the possibility at least of a much more humane and less punitive approach to young people. But there are questions.

First is too much being made of the “revolutionary” approach being adopted? It’s reported for example that there are “teachers rather than guards.”  But of course there are specific officers to maintain and support the safety and security of the academy.  According to the Oasis proposal to run the school, “should restraint be needed; security guards will do this safely and with the least amount of restriction as possible.” Good that they minimise the use of force but let’s not pretend there are no guards. The normalised use of physical restraint has probably been the single biggest shortcoming in Secure Training Centres so the School must find safe ways of managing very volatile young people.  An ethos of “relentless love” and “healing” may not be enough.

Second, what is the core approach of the Secure School? Maybe it’s me but despite the many positive and constructive values espoused by Oasis on their website and in their proposal, what’s at the heart of the Secure School seems a bit elusive. Chalke says the core principle behind it “is an unshakeable commitment to the belief that the only way to create positive change for the young people we serve, as well as to make our streets and communities safer, is to ensure that restoration sits at the very heart of the youth custodial system.”  

What does that mean in practice? Who is restoring what to whom? To the young people, those they have harmed, their families? Time will tell.   

Third, how will we know what’s going on? According to an Assurance Handbook, conventional contract management won’t be applied with an approach instead “which accords more autonomy, provides integrated services, and assesses outcomes holistically and takes a collaborative problem-solving approach to continuous improvement”. That’s taking a lot on trust.

On the other hand, OFSTED will inspect twice a year though there’s no role for the Prisons Inspectorate. An evaluation strategy is supposed to be in place at least six months before opening, looking at safety and the indicators that contribute to reduced reoffending, for example, progress in education, intervention delivery and the quality of staff-student relationships.

It should also look at the extent to which the School is turning down referrals. As a type of Secure Childrens Home, Oasis Restore may refuse placements of children they consider “inappropriate." Persistent refusal of placements could however be considered a breach of the provisions of the Funding Agreement for which Ministry of Justice could issue a termination warning notice. Chalke says, “there are no exclusions from here”, but this issue will need to be monitored carefully. So too will the quality of care provided for the small number of girls likely to be accomodated. 

Self- styled revolutions are no guarantors of a better world. In a related field, the “Rehabilitation Revolution” produced the shambles of privatisation from which the probation service has yet to recover.

As for the Secure School, I’m cautiously optimistic that its small scale, the values driven approach of the staff and the goodwill behind the initiative will serve it and the young people well. But we cannot take it for granted.

What should a Labour Government do on Youth Justice?

Reshaping the approach to offending by young people formed an important strand of New Labour’s domestic policy agenda from 1997-2010. This was based on the idea that an effective response to children and young people in trouble can prevent them going on to a life of crime and therefore contribute not only to a safer society but reduced spending on justice and prisons in the long term.

While the national Youth Justice Board (YJB) and local Youth Offending Teams (YOT) are still in place to provide a constructive multi-disciplinary approach to children who offend, services available from police, local authorities and the NHS has been hard hit. The YJB and YOTs need to be relaunched and re-energised if they are to effectively meet the challenges facing an incoming government. The system of closed institutions for the most serious and persistent young offenders has been in crisis for much of the period since 2010 and requires urgent and sustained attention. 

The Labour Party has announced that reforming services for young people will be the focus of a major cross-departmental initiative, Young Futures, if it wins the next election. Key to that will be an investment in the recruitment, retention and capacity building of staff working with young people in trouble, making use of the growing evidence base put together by the Youth Endowment Foundation. Providing opportunities for mentoring and therapeutic work must be as central to any self-styled crackdown as greater enforcement and punishment.

There are six key areas for development

 1) Promoting Best Practice in Prevention and Diversion

The evidence is clear that wherever possible children should be kept out of the formal justice system as much as possible because of the negative impact which arrest, court processing and sentences can have.  There has been a welcome fall in the numbers of entrants to the youth justice system but the way that this has been achieved and the kinds of alternative approaches used in response to youth crime and anti-social behaviour vary enormously across England and Wales. Identifying, promoting, and implementing the most effective forms of diversionary and restorative activity to offer is an important priority. So too is ensuring that practitioners in the police, youth offending services and other agencies are properly trained to deliver these activities.

2) Reducing the time from Arrest to Sentence

One of New Labour’s 1997 pledges was to halve the time from arrest to sentence for persistent young offenders. The target was met by 2001 but delays have crept back into the youth justice process despite the big fall in numbers prosecuted.  While these reflect well known problems in the system as a whole, priority should be given to speeding up cases involving children and young people.

3 Professionalising Youth Justice

Youth Justice suffers from the paradox that crime committed by children is of great political and social concern, yet its practitioners lack professional recognition. This lack of recognition affects their status and identity with other relevant professionals such as teachers and the wider public. To fix this, investment is needed in the provision of appropriate training and skill development and exploration of the scope for professional accreditation or registration.

4 Promoting Relationship Based Practice with young people in trouble

Research on what works in managing children who offend has found an increasing emphasis on the importance of how practitioners work with young people. Child First and Trauma Informed Practice have strong adherents, but a more overarching and comprehensive framework of evidence based practice is needed to engage the range of professions and agencies working with young people in trouble in the community, residential care, and secure settings. Relationship based practice provides such a framework and should be encouraged across the piece. It involves attitudes – such as being open, honest, optimistic, and hopeful – and techniques like motivational interviewing, pro-social modelling and problem solving.

5 Extending the Youth Offending Team approach to Young Adults

Locally based Youth Offending Teams have proved largely effective vehicles for applying multi agency work with children who offend. Inspection reports have been mainly positive in stark contrast to those about probation services. The YOT approach would have value with older teenagers and young adults, who often do not reach adult maturity until their mid-twenties. Piloting the use of youth justice measures with this older cohort should produce better outcomes than interventions led by a probation service still struggling to recover from rapid organisational changes and unsustainable demands .

6 Transforming Training of Staff in the Custodial Estate 

The Chief Inspector prisons recently reported that Young Offender Institutions (YOIs) employ hundreds of staff, yet they barely talk to the boys in their care.  Many young people spend relatively short periods out of their rooms each day. Almost one in five staff have been leaving YOIs. Given the historically low numbers of children and young people in custody, there is scope for a major initiative to improve the education and skills of staff through distance learning supplemented by practical experience. The long awaited Secure School due to open shortly may provide a model for transforming the system as a whole, but we cannot wait for that.

What is to be Done?

 

It should now be clear to all that the prison system is facing a very serious operational crisis.  It’s at its most acute in local prisons like Wandsworth where the Chief Inspector, summarising his findings as death, drugs and despair, found a jail failing at the most basic level, with no reliable roll to ensure that all prisoners are accounted for and a degree of despondency he’d not seen before.

But we should be troubled too by an unnoticed local watchdog report on Long Lartin, a high security prison, where much of the existing surveillance technology is obsolete or unserviceable and the emergency control room cannot properly monitor the wings. “This limits its ability to deploy timely assistance in emergencies and seriously compromises the safety of prisoners and staff”.  

In a custodial estate of 120 prisons, there will always be a number where the challenge of too many prisoners, too few staff or crumbling infrastructure become overwhelming. As the Prison Governors Association has pointed out, the relentless and growing demand for cell space leaves almost no scope to grant temporary relief to places like Wandsworth by reducing their capacity.

Extending early release provisions and using police cells may buy the system some time but without proper resettlement support some of those let out early, may be back inside all too soon.

Probation will be “reset” to enable it to focus on its highest priorities but the National Association of Probation Officers has issued a breathless warning of “early release chaos”- and an increasing risk to public safety- without offering much in the way of alternative solutions.  

What more could be done? In the short term, there’s a need to close more tightly the entrance to the court and prison system as well as throwing opening the back door. Developing the use of Out of Court Disposals would for example reduce pressure on the magistrates courts.

Given the concentration of overcrowding in local jails, guidance from the Attorney General, Lady Chief Justice and Lord Chancellor could be issued encouraging alternatives to custodial remands whenever possible, if necessary, monitored with an electronic tag.

Larger sentencing discounts for early guilty pleas could also reduce periods spent both on remand and under sentence. The Justice Ministry are reviewing this but need to get on and act.

The Sentencing Council should expedite too the publication of their guideline on the imposition of community and custodial sentences which could result in fewer short jail terms. More urgency should be given to enacting the Sentencing Bill which would introduce a presumption that custodial sentences of 12 months or less will be suspended.

A more radical measure would be to ask courts to keep out of prison all convicted offenders who have successfully spent their remand period on bail in the community. If a custodial sentence is imposed, it  could be suspended, deferred, or postponed depending on the circumstances.

As for sentence lengths, the Sentencing Council should for most offences be asked to revise its guidelines to bring the average back down to where it was 10 years ago.  After all, most of its guidelines have not been intended to raise the “going rate” but for whatever reason that’s what’s happened with disastrous consequences for the prisons where the increased terms are served. Many of those being released early, will have served longer than they would have in the recent past.  

None of this will be politically easy and, in an election, year creating a much needed cross party consensus seems fanciful. But surely someone in Labour must recognise that the prison crisis is likely to be theirs to resolve before too long and it’s in their interest as well as the government’s to prevent it getting even worse.There are of course many reforms a new government should introduce to create a more sustainable, effective and humane justice system. But the priority now its to keep it functioning and safe.