Tag: voting

Why Prisoners Deserve to Vote: A “victim’s”/survivor’s perspective

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CW: discussion of racism, human rights violations, discussion of sexual violence, mention of rape and abusive relationship, mention of the Christchurch terrorist, and police. And since I can’t add a footnote to the title, here’s a note on the “victim” language.1

On Friday, I gave an oral submission to the Justice Select Committee on the Electoral (Registration of Sentenced Prisoners) Amendment Bill, which would restore to prisoners sentenced to terms of less than three years the right to vote. The video is available on their Facebook page (my submission starts 9:40 from the end) and my written submission is here. Here is my oral submission in written form:

“Tēnā koutou members of the Justice Select Committee,

Thank you for inviting me to give an oral submission to you this afternoon. I have been told that you will already have had the chance to read over my written submission2, so I won’t go over all of it again.

I would, however, like to reiterate that I do not believe that this Bill goes far enough.

As I am sure you will be aware, the Supreme Court has ruled that current legislation is inconsistent with the Bill of Rights Act 1990 AND the Waitangi Tribunal released a report last year saying that section 80(1)(d) of the Electoral Act 1993 disproportionately affects Māori (which should be unsurprising, given that Māori are vastly overrepresented in our prison populations) and that it “is inconsistent with, and in part undermines, the purpose of the corrections system under section 5 of the Corrections Act 2004 and, therefore, prejudices the rehabilitation and reintegration of Māori prisoners; a further breach of the principle of active protection.” The Tribunal has called for this section to be urgently REPEALED, not replaced with a watered down version which this new Bill does.

I agree with Golriz Ghahraman who has said that we don’t have human rights because we earn them, we have them because we are human.

There have been questions raised by members of this committee about the fact that by detaining prisoners we are, in fact, taking away some of their rights already, so why do [those of us in favour of repealing the entire prisoner voting ban] think that that’s different. I can’t speak for all of us, of course.

For me, I think this quote from the Waitangi Tribunal report is the clearest response:

“The right to participate in the electoral system is exactly that – a right, not a privilege. Prisoners do not lose all their rights of citizenship when incarcerated. For example, prisoners are still entitled to their right to be protected from harm and torture. Incarceration is the punishment. Removing the right to vote is over and above the sentence of punishment and inflicts disproportionate prejudice on Māori prisoners.”

The Regulatory Impact Statement to the Ministry of Justice also makes the case that “Removing the right to vote is an additional punishment on top of incarceration, rather than incidental to it. There is no evidence that suggests disqualifying sentenced prisoners from voting deters people from committing crimes.”

If anyone is going to come at me with a question about “but what about this terrible person, are you saying you want them to vote?”, then:

Firstly, Dr Smith I am horrified that you find it appropriate to name him.3 I choose to follow the example of the Prime Minister and not name him.

Secondly, my answer is an emphatic YES!

I am a survivor of rape and an abusive relationship. Now, the man who raped me isn’t going to prison (though I wish he would), but if he were, I wouldn’t want him prevented from voting. What on earth do you think that would achieve?! Do you think he’s going to vote to make rape legal??

The solution here is better protection for those of us affected by violent crimes, not arbitrarily taking away prisoners’ human rights (when a sizeable portion of violent offenders aren’t even be covered by it!). We are better than that.

Keep in mind that only 10% of survivors of sexual violence report to police (I dearly wish I hadn’t!), and of those only three goes to court and one of those gets a conviction. So there are a lot of violent offenders still out there, like the man who raped me, who aren’t captured either by current legislation or this bill. The lines drawn here are arbitrary.

All that this achieves is a vague sense of “those people in prison are bad, they must be punished, so we will take things [in this case rights] away from them”, leaving us, on the outside with a smug sense of self-satisfaction. A sort of “gotcha”. But… that is othering, for one thing, acting as though the people in prison are different than, or less than us – they are still human, remember, and we have human rights because we are human, not because they are cookies we get if we’ve been good – and for another thing, do you honestly believe that everyone who has committed a crime is in prison and that there is no one in prison who has been wrongfully convicted?!

Think back to the statistics I just gave you about sexual violence. Remember all of those – yes, violent! – offenders who are still in our midst. And then think back to all of those statistics in the Waitangi Tribunal report about the vast over-representation of Māori in our prisons. Are you honestly going to tell me that you believe that Māori commit crimes at such vastly higher rates than all other ethnic groups in Aotearoa?

It seems to me that it is much more likely that our justice system is rotten, that it is racist, and that we, as a society ought to do whatever we can to treat our prisoners as humanely as possible, and not to forget that there but for the grace of a wrongful conviction go you or I.

So, what do we do? We look at the evidence. Fortunately for you it’s all in the Waitangi Tribunal report. The Ministry of Justice even compiled an excellent Regulatory Impact Statement which includes the advice from the Waitangi Tribunal report amongst others. Take note of their advice. Extend this Bill.

The Supreme Court, in its 2018 ruling that the 2010 Amendment is inconsistent with the Bill of Rights Act says that “The three year disqualification term had originally been included in the Electoral Act 1993 following the recommendation of the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform that such a term was comparable to the proposed loss of voting rights on three years’ absence from New Zealand.”

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but prisoners in Aotearoa (unlike asylum seekers in Australia who are kept in offshore detention centres) are actually IN Aotearoa, and therefore not, in fact, absent from New Zealand.

It would appear, then, that the only conceivable (and I say conceivable here, and not defensible, because I do not consider it defensible) position that one might have for not extending voting rights to prisoners imprisoned for more than three years is because one believes that human rights can be granted and taken away arbitrarily, as though they were cookies and not, in fact, RIGHTS, or… blatant racism. Because surely none of us here are under any delusions that this affects tangata whenua more than anyone else.

In conclusion… I hope that you, as representatives of the Crown, ensure that in your reports back to parliament and in the way you vote on this Bill going forward, that you act consistently with te tiriti principles of partnership, kāwanatanga, tino rangatiratanga, active protection and equity and enact the recommendations from the Tribunal’s report!”

Finally, to have them all neatly in one place, here are all the relevant links (including the ones I used in my research for this) in one place:

1 I do not like to call myself a “victim”, however those on the (political) right, who oppose this Bill, have been continually weaponising those of us who are survivors of violent crimes, claiming that we would not want the perpetrators of these crimes to have voting rights, or that it would somehow harm us. These people do not speak for me. Yes, the bad ex harmed me, thereby making me a “victim” of a crime, but I am also a survivor. I speak for myself.

2 Written submissions should all be available online, however at the moment only 69 submissions are visible online, the same number there were when I made mine, so mine isn’t there yet. I heard one of the Committee members say that they had received over 2,500 written submissions, so I suspect they are working through the backlog and once I see mine has been posted, I will add a direct link. The link in the PDF of my written submission is broken, but it goes to Episode 6 of The Citizen’s Handbook.

3 I had watched a number of the oral submissions the day before I made mine, in preparation for making mine and had noticed that Dr Nick Smith found it appropriate, in his questions to almost each submitter I saw submitting in support of extending voting rights to all prisoners,to name the Christchurch shooter in order to ask submitters if they believed that he, too, should have the right to vote. I wanted to pre-empt that question. His response to me was to interrupt me after I said that I choose to follow Jacinda’s example and say “we still live in a free society… just…”.