Should Prisoners Be Allowed to Vote In the Upcoming New Zealand Elections?

In three months time New Zealand is holding an election to determine its 51st parliament. But despite best efforts, getting people to the polling booths to partake in the democratic process can be a struggle. In the 2011 election only 74 percent of voters bothered, making it the lowest turnout since 1887. However there is one sizable group of adults who cannot exercise their right to vote, even if they wanted to. Approximately 8600 inmates will be omitted from voting in September due to a private members bill that was pushed through by flash in the pan politician Paul Quinn in 2010, and served up with little opposition. To put things in perspective, even Israel, which has a questionable human rights record, lets prisoners vote.

Maximum security inmate Arthur Taylor is pretty familiar with the inside of the courtroom after being convicted more than 150 times, as well as being an litigant itch that won’t be scratched. He has previously fought for smoking in prisons and this time he’s in court he’s trying to win inmates back the vote. Late last month a High Court judge reserved decision on Taylor’s case, after opposition claimed the court cannot overturn a parliamentary decision. But in Taylor’s corner is former head of prisons, Kim Workman, who is now the director of Rethinking Crime and Punishment. Workman is of the mind that the legislation stopping prisoners from voting not only defies Human Rights Laws, but it flies in the face of the Treaty of Waitangi as it disadvantages Maori who are six-times more likely to be imprisoned than non-Maori, and therefore, six times more likely to be deprived of the vote. I couldn’t speak to Taylor about his case, because media have virtually no access to inmates, so I asked Workman to tell me more.

VICE: Firstly Kim, do you believe that inmates are politically minded and want to vote?

Kim Workman: No, I don’t think they are, and I think a good number of them will not have exercised their vote. But that’s because many of them have never felt like part of civil society. When you start looking at them, and knowing that 80 per cent have drug and alcohol dependency issues, 40 per cent have mental health issues, 90 per cent are illiterate to some degree—what you are talking about is a group that don’t feel part of society.

Arthur Taylor is an example of an inmate who has become fiercely politically active while in prison…

Oh, he’s an aberration.

Right, and so people say that he is a nuisance out to agitate the system, is that the case?

Well, he is a bloody nuisance. Back when I was head of prisons having Arthur Taylor there would have driven me spare because people like that take up so much time. But the courts love him, and the interesting thing about Arthur Taylor is that he is right more often than he is wrong. And so you can’t just dismiss him. And personally, I think he has got a really strong case this time. He has quoted the Treaty Of Waitangi as one of his grounds, that it’s a breach of the treaty and I think he’s right. Under Article Three of the treaty Maori were promised the same level of services and right as non-Maori, but in this case they’re not getting it because they are disproportionately affected by the legislation.

How are Maori more affected by the legislation?

Well, Maori are six times more likely to end up in prison than non-Maori, and there is a human rights law that says you can’t disproportionately disadvantage an ethnic group, or there can’t be unlawful discrimination. There are pockets of New Zealand, such as Otara and Flaxmere where Maori are disproportionately represented and their vote actually counts for something in that constituency. I know of streets in Otara where I have counted 85 adult males currently in prison at one time. There’s school in Otara where 50 per cent of the male members of family are in prison. Think of the impact of the Maori vote in that area. So you can understand there is a whole new issue there about disenfranchising the Maori voters.

There are a lot of people who believe that disenfranchisement is what happens when you are imprisoned for a crime. Why should prisoners have the same rights as others?

Well, those are usually people who have a view of themselves as being somehow superior, and they have a view of the world of good people and bad people. And probably as part of that, a belief that people who go to prison need to be punished. So that hasn't got anything to do with reducing crime at all, what it has to do with is a belief in the right to punish.

There’s no evidence that when you treat people in that way, giving them harsh sentences and inferior accommodation, that that will improve their behaviour. So the only justification is that they want to punish and be cruel to people and treat them as less than human. There is a cost to that, and the cost is that people treated in that way are more likely to reoffend when they leave prison and more likely to victimise others.

So do you consider that being removed of rights, like voting, is a second punishment on top of being imprisoned?

Yes it is. Twenty five years ago government came up with the motto “you go to prison as punishment not for punishment”, in other words, the sentence is the punishment and you are not entitled to apply more punishment on top of the sentence.

That was a kind of “government slogan”?

Well, certainly that’s what that the Department of Justice used to say in those days. I was head of prisons at that time and we always made that clear to the staff, that they weren’t there to apply more punishment or make conditions unpleasant for them. Now okay, many inmates may not vote at election time, but the right to vote is a symbolic thing that actually tells us more about the kind of nation we are, as a country that says it believes in human rights.

The law came into effect in 2010. Why do you think that law was adopted?

I think that law was a progression of punitiveness that has been in progress since the early 1990s. It arose from the market reforms of the mid-1980s and the rise of neoliberalism. Now what happened at that time, is that there was a shift from believing in collective enterprise and welfare and the duty to look after people who were marginalised - who were poor, who were unable to really manage on their own - to a different philosophy which was about survival of the fittest. Part of that was “penal populism”, which was about dishing it out to the offenders and punishing them in a way that we hadn’t ever done before. So then we started to see justification for being tough on prisoners… but nobody thought of the electoral vote until Paul Quinn came along. He was a hopeless MP, he only lasted three years, but he wanted to make a splash, so he bought out this voting bill. And once it was on a roll it hard to put down.

Arthur Taylor is trying to put it down now in court, but the judge has reserved decision. What do you think the long-term outcome will be?

Well as I understand it that Attorney General complained that the court can’t legally overturn a decision of parliament. My view is that where you have a decision of parliament that was made without regard of the proper process, as it was in this case, then it raises the question of whether it was a legitimate exercise of the government’s power. So the moral part of me would say this is ethically wrong. Whether it’s legally wrong remains a matter for the judge. I’m not a law expert, but Arthur Taylor believes he has an argument that parliament has erred on this decision and doesn’t think the legislation stacks up, so his case should be heard on that basis.

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