Abstract
In November 2010, shortly after the formation of the Coalition Government, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom declared that even contemplating giving prisoners the right to vote made him feel ‘physically ill’ (Hansard, 3 November 2010, col. 920). Poor David Cameron, for contemplate it he must. In 2005 the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) confirmed that the UK ban on prisoners voting was a breach of its obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and Parliament has been dodging the issue ever since. The story behind the decision of the Court is a long one, and few people outside penal reform campaigns will be familiar with it. However, the political calculation behind Cameron’s remark is instructive because it symbolizes a specific kind of political arithmetic that has profound consequences for democracy. The apathy and indifference towards prisoners that Cameron so readily translates into intimations of visceral loathing is part of a wider political drift towards a kind of sentimental, insular Anglo-meritocracy that threatens to abandon hard won democratic principles (Seymour, 2010).
Susan Easton’s erudite exposition of the social, civil and humanitarian implications of prisoners’ rights demonstrates why we need to care about these rights and defend democratic principles. Easton’s thesis as outlined in the first chapter, entitled ‘Prisoners’ rights: From social death to citizenship’, connects prisoners’ rights to wider social benefits and deeper identification with the values of inalienable human rights and democracy. Easton’s argument concerns the need to transcend a thin ‘contract’ approach to citizenship that valorizes rights-in-relation-to-responsibilities. This discourse tends towards a noisy but empty politics of virtue built principally, but covertly, around its excluding conditionality. Constructed thus, rights are the gift of the powerful (the great and good), granted to those who deserve them and can prove their worthiness to belong (the rest of us, if we behave). Their retraction from prisoners provides a convenient exemplary tableau on which to display this exclusivity and rehearse its damaging effects.
In an earlier life, as a youth justice worker, I was once berated by a friendly but intemperate judge, who wondered aloud whether practitioners were taught any law at the youth offending team. She meant well, but her ignorance of my working environment was almost as complete as mine was of hers. I sometimes recognize this mutual incomprehension of law and lawyers among criminologists, despite criminology’s promiscuous reputation for getting into bed with any available academic discipline. Easton, Reader in Law at Brunel Law School, easily engages the criminological literature but retains a legal scholar’s eye for legislation’s framing role. The history of struggles around prisoners’ rights (Chapter 2), the changing form and nature of prison regimes (Chapter 4), and ‘The increasing importance of international human rights law and standards’ (the title of Chapter 3) are littered with case references and landmark judgments. Easton supplies the necessary technical detail, provides a comprehensive summative review of procedural justice (Chapter 5) and also manages to convey a deep commitment to, and restatement of, certain transcendent legal ideals.
This commitment and those ideals are part of what make this book so timely. There is a remarkable and rising hostility to law among sections of the new lumpenbourgeoisie that sees law as always helping someone else (Erh-Soon Tay, 1978). The sense of a universal claim upon the machinery of society for the material conditions of personal freedom is a paradox that haunts neo-liberal triumphalism, expressed with such force by Cameron.
The ambivalence of law is a theme identified by Chantraine (2013) as particularly troubling to the prison because as a ‘formalized tyranny’ it exists as an exception to the law’s own rules. The trend towards prisoners’ rights, argues Chantraine (2013: 31), destabilizes the principles of imprisonment by having the potential of putting ‘law in the service of both the administration and the incarcerated’. The argument for prisoners’ rights changes the basis of power relations in prison and gives ‘greater traction to prison criticism’ by implicitly dissolving the boundary of ‘prison-centric critique’ (2013: 31). It makes it a civil matter, one for society as a whole, for all of us. We can learn a lot, he suggests, by working on the difficulty prisons have with rights. They cannot say ‘no’ to them entirely, and yet saying ‘yes’ makes for trouble. All too often, his research reveals, the need for security reduces rights to privileges.
In 1982, in an even earlier life, I had the misfortune of being imprisoned for a few months. I remember a prison officer, before the civilizing advances propelled by the Strangeways riots and the Woolf Report (HMSO, 1991), stumbling over the ambivalence Chantraine describes. ‘Basically’, he told me, ‘you’ve got no rights here. Well, that’s not exactly true, but that’s the best, the simplest way, of seeing it.’ Easton’s book proves otherwise. As the UK government prepares its parsimonious response to the ECtHR on the issue of prisoners’ voting rights, and before the anti-democratic vitriol of the Conservative Party seethes to the surface again, threatening the Human Rights Act 1998 and other progressive achievements, you should read this book and consider what our treatment of prisoners says about the kind of society that we live in.