 Good morning, and welcome to the 19th meeting of the Equality and Human Rights Committee in 2017. Can I make the usual request that mobile phones and digital devices are switched off or on flight mode? We have apologies this morning from our colleague David Torrance, and I'm sure we want to send our best wishes to him. Our first agenda item this morning is a declaration of interest from the new member of our committee, Jamie Greene. MSP and Jamie, can I invite you to make a declaration of interest? Thank you, convener. I'm only declaration relevant to the committees that I'm co-convener of the cross-party group on LGBTI issues. Thanks very much, Jamie. Welcome to committee. We're looking forward to working with you. Agenda item 2 is an agreement from committee to take agenda item 4 in private. Our committee agreed to that action. Thank you very much. Moving on to our substantive agenda item this morning on prisoner voting. We are glad to have Patrick Harvie here. Patrick Harvie, MSP, wrote to the committee in June, requesting that we consider the issue of the blanket ban on prisoner voting in Scotland. The committee considered this request, and this morning's evidence session from Patrick and then from a panel is the result of that. Patrick only has a half an hour with us because he has to be at another committee, so I'm going to go straight into the session this morning with Patrick. I know that you have an opening statement for us, Mr Harvie, so if you would like to carry on with that. Thanks very much. Good morning, convener and colleagues. First of all, thank you for allowing the agenda to give me a chance to speak to you for a few minutes before I go to my own committee. I also thank you for showing an interest in this topic. The reason why I have something to contribute on this issue is that, during the scrutiny of the franchise bill in relation to the independence referendum a few years back, as you'll recall, the franchise was established in a separate piece of legislation to the referendum itself. Both myself and Alison McInnes raised the issue of prisoners voting at that time in relation to the referendum, the franchise for which had been temporarily devolved and does not quite trigger the same hard and fast human rights compliance issues as parliamentary franchise. However, the same principles, the same arguments of principles, we both felt deserved to be aired. I think that the approach that we both took at the time was to give the committee and the Government a range of options to consider for making changes to the current blanket ban. The current blanket ban in relation to the parliamentary franchise is not compliant with human rights. As the Scottish Government and I think most of the Scottish political spectrum supports the continued existence of the human rights act and compliance standards with human rights legislation, it's, I think, unreasonable to think that we'll simply continue to ignore that fact that we are currently not in compliance or continuing that the franchise as it stands and the blanket ban is not in compliance with the principles of human rights. There's a range of ways that we could go on this. As I think the committee is very aware already, we could remove the ban altogether, we could, for example, allow prisoners to vote who are nearing the end of their sentence. I think, for example, one argument is that those prisoners who are preparing for release ought to be faced with issues around what it means to be a fully active participant in society. Voting is only one small aspect of that, but it could be an important symbolic aspect. Or, indeed, we could allow judges the discretion. For me, I think that the fundamental question is why the prison wall is the appropriate boundary. People are convicted of offences that used to attract a prison sentence but which now attract a community sentence. There doesn't seem to be an argument in principle as to why they ought to have lost the right to vote in previous decades but no longer should lose the right to vote. There are some offences that members might feel would attract a non-custodial sentence but ought to trigger a question over the right to vote if someone had committed an offence under electoral law. For example, there might be an argument in principle that one of the consequences would be that they lose the right to vote in a system that they had abused, but they would be unlikely to be seen to pose a threat to society's safety, so they would be unlikely to attract a significant prison sentence. I hope that those are some of the issues that the committee will consider. The last thing that I will say before questions is that I also hope that this is not seen in isolation. I am glad that this is being discussed by the Equalities and Human Rights Committee rather than in the context merely of electoral administration because there are other equalities issues that ought to be thought about in relation to the franchise. For example, the future voting rights of EU citizens if this country is ultimately taken from the European Union. The rights of non-EU countries citizens to vote as well. I think that there is an argument for taking national identity out of it altogether and somebody making residents a requirement in order to vote. In relation to disability and to gypsy traveller communities, there are issues around other barriers to participation in voting that have been looked at before but which I think still require a bit of a refresh if we are going to be realistically removing those barriers in practical terms to ensure that everyone is able to vote. I hope that this issue of prisoners voting is seen in the context of that wider equalities and human rights agenda. There are a number of aspects in this that we will look at all of that. You have touched on a few of them already. There are obviously a number of arguments that go along with each of those aspects. One of the issues that you mentioned in your opening remarks was how you could practically do some of that. We all know what the headline-grabbing points will be in this, but to look at it from a practical point of view, if you get any ideas on how practically we could ensure whether it is the end-band completely or it is a restricted group of people at the end of their sentence or on remand or in different circumstances, the practical ways that that could be rolled out in order to give people the right to vote? First of all, it is entirely possible to do that within a prison context. It is not about day release to go and vote at the local school. It would be the job of a few minutes to pick up the phone to any one of the vast majority of European countries that already operate something other than a blanket ban to ask for some experiences about the practical operation. If, for example, only a particular group within a prison context is able to exercise the right to vote, then it needs to be done in a way that does not overly draw a distinction between people. It does not allow one person to oversee another's vote or to potentially intimidate them, so there are some practical issues around that. I suspect that there would be perhaps more anxieties or concerns or stereotypes around that than we would actually find in practice. It may well be that not many prisoners would have a huge interest in voting. I think that that would be a matter of regret. As I say, particularly in the run-up to release, prisoners ought to be faced with challenging arguments about what it means to be a member of a society that they are about to return to. Participation in democracy is part of that, but I would like to think that it is something that is seen in positive terms, not simply that we are forced to change the law, but that revising the law gives us the opportunity to actually look at a better balance between the questions of the different purposes of punishment and where the deprivation of the right to vote sits within that. There are three other aspects that I think have fallen on whether the right to vote is a yes or a no. There is a moral aspect and there are two sides to that argument. People will say that it is morally wrong for a prisoner to get the right to vote and people will say that it is morally right for people to get the right to vote. There is an ethical argument in that, as much as we want a free and fair society that believes in redemption and rehabilitation, and there is an ethical argument for it that I am sure others will find ethical arguments against it as well. However, there is also the legal argument that has brought it to our attention and to your attention is the Supreme Court ruling and where that has put both Governments in Scotland and Westminster and both parliaments for that matter as well. Have you got any insight on how we maybe handle that and the areas that we go to look at in order to gather the purest and best evidence? First of all, the balance between that moral argument as you put it and the legal argument, I can understand the instinctive moral argument that some people would express. I think David Cameron put it in what might also be described as rather headline-grabbing terms when he said that he felt physically sick at the idea of prisoners voting. I don't understand why that moral argument can be made in relation to prison but not in relation to non-custodial sentences. If it is the view that someone who has committed a crime by virtue of having committed a crime and being convicted of it loses the right to participate in society, loses some of their freedoms that non-offenders take for granted and have a right to access, why is it that we don't deprive all offenders on conviction of the vote until their sentence, including community sentences, has been carried out? Some people might say that we should. I think that the point of a community sentence is to enable somebody to live their life as part of society while still experiencing a punishment and giving some recompense to society for the offence that they've committed. I don't feel that it's appropriate to remove the right to vote from all of those people. However, if there's a moral argument, surely it's about committing offences not about prison walls. As for the legal argument, I would stress again, as the Howard League has reminded the committee in its written submission, that the UK is one of very few countries that are signed up to the Council of Europe which still enforce a blanket ban. I think that they cite Armenia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Russia and the UK as an opportunity to learn from many of the other European countries that have actually been more successful than the UK in reducing reoffending and in building rehabilitation into the purpose of the criminal justice system. I think that the opportunity should be taken and we're not short of examples around the rest of Europe of how that can be done better. Thank you, Mr Harvey. Now let's go, Hamilton. Thank you, convener. Good morning, Patrick. Thank you for coming to see us. I first of all echo a lot of what you said. I've been a long-time supporter of the Howard League for Penal Reform, but I'd like to thank you for recognising the work of my colleague, the Liberal Democrat, former Liberal Democrat MSP Alison McKinnison in this regard. I think that we are fellow travellers with you on this issue. I think, convener, you talked about the three issues that underpin this. I think that there's a fourth one as well. Prisoners have to endure prison conditions, they have to endure the vagaries of the criminal justice system, they still potentially pay taxes on earnings that are coming in outside. There is an argument, as with all discussions about franchise in terms of the ripe representation in the Government of those conditions. I have experienced the testimony of two particular constituents that I've been working with in HNP Edinburgh, who have views on the conditions in which they're held, but also in the views around the criminal justice system that they are progressing through. It strikes me that the range of options that you present are very interesting, but I would struggle personally to see why you wouldn't extend a removal of the ban to all prisoners, because they all, to my opinion, should have the right to challenge the Government of the day, as it were, or hold their decision makers to account for the conditions in which they're held and for the way in which the money that they're potentially contributing is spent in their incarceration and, indeed, the criminal justice system. I wonder if you can tell the committee that you talk about that range of options, where you personally land in terms of those considerations that we might take forward. Personally, if I thought that there was a consensus in favour of removing the ban on prisoners voting altogether, I would have no difficulty with that. My suspicion is that that won't be where the consensus lies on this issue. What the Supreme Court ruling requires us to do is to revise the blanket ban. The opportunity that I think that gives us is to talk about the questions of principle. If somebody in the debate, whether in this Parliament or anywhere else, wants to advance an argument of principle, why a particular category of prisoners ought not to be able to participate in elections to this Parliament or at any other level, I think that I would welcome hearing such a principled argument. I don't think that I've heard one so far other than the simple instinctive that they've done wrong, which, for me, doesn't really cut the mustard. You'll recognise this feeling yourself. I'm a member of one of the smaller parties in this Parliament. Very often, I think that we're right and everybody else is wrong. That's not enough either. If this Parliament is going to make a change, it has to be one that's going to get majority support across the chamber, and one that I hope that the majority of people in Scotland will understand. I suspect that we will end up making a change that's somewhere in between, where we are now, a blanket ban and complete removal of that ban altogether. I can understand that there are certain categories of offence that people might feel are so serious that a person's right to influence the Government of the rest of society ought to be suspended. I think that underlying your point was also the argument that people, while they're in prison, are still part of our society. They still have a right to have their governance carried out in a way that respects their human rights and recognises the conditions in which they are living. I don't think that any of us would want to get to the point where politicians are going round prisons quoting votes, but we should recognise that they are human beings and that the conditions in which they live are our responsibility. The Parliament in the past has made serious errors in terms of prison conditions and failed on some occasions to respect the human rights of prisoners. Perhaps part of the question of the connection between the prisoner's right to vote and the politician's responsibility to take seriously the welfare and conditions of our prison estate is another aspect of the argument. I disagree slightly in the sense that politicians should try and engage. If we extended the franchise to the prison population, it would be incumbent on us to try and engage with that population to take that opportunity to cast their vote and engage in hustings in prisons. I think that lots of people would like to see us in prison from time to time. A few of us have made it there. The thing that I would most like to explore is the idea that prisoners might not be given the demographics that they come from and the voting patterns that we see in those graphics on the outside might not be engaged. My experience is that, from the prisoners that I have worked with in this job in previous careers, that that is the first time that they come cheap by gel with public policy decision making. Because they have time to consider it, they have to sometimes represent themselves or build cases behind their own liberation, they in fact become far more energised and engaged than they would have done on the outside. I would expect to see a surprising number of prisoners taking up that opportunity. The final thing, if I may convene, is to explore that point. It hadn't really occurred to me before that we hand down all kinds of sentences in this country. Some are community based, some are financially based and some are incarceration. It is only that point at which the key is turned in the lock at the moment that you lose your right to vote. We all heard the First Minister talking about her programme for government on Tuesday, in which she happily took up a long-time lived-dem policy and, I believe, one that is shared by the Greens in limiting short-term sentences to no less than a year, which allows people that much-needed rehabilitation time and the focus of any interventions that we can do in prison to take hold. That will then change the goalpost, so we have people that might have been in prison who would not have had the vote, who now have the vote. Surely, perhaps you agree with me, Patrick, that that completely undermines the whole principle of just removing the votes of prisoners, because it is an arbitrary goalpost as to when we use incarceration and when we do not. Certainly, the change that has been proposed by the Scottish Government, and you are right that I will welcome that when we see the detail of it, is another example of how the use of prison has been changing over the years. I think that it is appropriate that we have prisons and use prisons sparingly for those situations in which somebody poses a genuine threat to society and where the work that can be done with them inside a prison is the most effective way of getting their life back on track and making them less likely to commit offences in the future. However, I think that the arbitrary nature of the relationship between an offence and the loss of the right to vote is an issue that the committee should look at. There will be many examples where two people might have committed exactly the same offence on exactly the same day, perhaps together, and because of different circumstances in their lives, one receives a custodial sentence and another receives a non-custodial sentence. Or they might be sentenced on different days and because of the when a weekend falls, they serve a different amount of time in prison. One of them might happen to be in prison during the course of an election or before the point of registration, the cut-off date for registration for voting in an election and the other be luckier and be able to exercise the vote. The deprivation of the right to vote does not directly relate to the offence that has been committed or the circumstances in which it was committed. The arbitrary nature of this aspect of punishment seems to me inconsistent. Again, because we have to change the blanket ban, I think that the opportunity should be taken positively to look at the wider issues that the question raises. I think that it is interesting if you look across Europe at the way that the prison populations are treated in the numbers of offenders and re-offending and the different models that they have in the way prisoners are treated, whether they are allowed to vote and what exceptions there are to that. There is a huge amount that we can learn if we look at our European partners and the way they treat people who are offenders with an end goal to re-offend them and reintegrate them back into society. I would have concerns if we went down a road of allowing judges discretion and whether or not someone would continue to be able to vote if they were given a custodial sentence, because I think that that opens up, as you have talked about earlier, a whole different range of options. At one end of the country, someone could decide that that person can have the right to vote at a different end and could decide that they can't. One particular area that we have not covered this morning is the geography of where the person votes, because quite often people are sentenced to a prison that is outwith the area that they live in. A number of prisoners will not be registered to vote anyway. I wonder whether you have any views on where they should vote. What part of the country should it be the prison that they are incarcerated in, or should the vote be taken place or given to them for their home address? I would be open to the arguments, but my instinct would be that they should be registered to vote in the place where they were resident at the time that they were sentenced, rather than in the place where the prison is physically located. There are communities that might find it unreasonable that a very large number of people are voting in that constituency that they live in simply because the prison happens to be located there. One of the things that I know that the Scottish Government is focused on and that I welcome is the need to maintain contact between prisoners and their family and community. That is one of the most important factors in reducing re-offending, if somebody feels that they remain connected to a community and to their family if they have one. Voting registration to vote may only be one symbolic aspect of that wider question, but I would prefer to see it placed in the context of that relationship to the community to which, ultimately, they will return when they leave prison. For that reason, I think that my instinct would be for either somebody remaining registered to vote where they were resident when they were sentenced, or being registered from within prison, but registered in the constituency that they were resident in. I have just one very brief question that follows on from that. Do you think that then there is an opportunity in the way that the postal voting system is done to use postal votes in prison for offenders? I do not see any problem with that, whatever. Whether the existing postal vote system or a bespoke system that the Scottish Prison Service or others felt that they were better able to manage, I really do not see that the practical implementation of that is in any way the problem. The problem that that raises is one of the instinct of recoil that David Cameron was expressing, as I mentioned earlier, and that some continue to feel. I understand that some people feel that instinct of recoil from the idea, but there is no point of principle, as I was saying earlier. It says that the prison wall should be the boundary between participating in voting and not participating in voting, particularly given the way that sentencing policy has changed. I just wanted to clarify something by listening to the evidence that you have given, and I should preface this with the statement that I come to the very open mind. It is a new subject to me, and it is absolutely fascinating. I find this very enlightening. Is it your argument that the right to vote is linked to the type of offence rather than the method of punishment? That is my first short question. That would not be my personal view. I would be open to hearing an argument that said particular types of offences should, by virtue of the nature of the offence, result in the deprivation of the right to vote. As I said to Alex Cole-Hamilton, if somebody wants to advocate a point of principle, a clear, comprehensive argument as to why a particular category of prisoners should not have the right to vote, I will listen to it with as open mind as you are bringing to this discussion today. The blanket ban has to end. For me that requires a debate about whether there is any basis for removing the right to vote from a particular category of prisoners. I am more open personally to the idea that breaching electoral law should suspend someone's right to vote for a period of time than being sentenced to prison should suspend somebody's right to vote. Participating in a system in which a person has themselves abused seems to be a reasonable basis for at least asking the question should that person still have the right to take part in that system. I am not personally going to advance an argument in favour of depriving the right to vote from any particular category of prisoners as currently stand. I am saying that the blanket ban has to end and if anybody wants to put forward an argument for continuing a particular type of ban, I will listen to it but the current status quo is not supportable. The example that you gave of perhaps two people committing the same crime but being sentenced differently in different parts of the country or relative to their circumstance, isn't it the case that by default that one person is given a custodial sentence and in that situation the judge has determined that a certain parameter of right should be removed from that person differently to a non-custodial sentence. Isn't it the case therefore that a custodial sentence attracts a loss of liberty in a different type of ways to somebody who is doing community service, for example? Other than the argument of it is your human right to vote, I am still waiting on the punch line in terms of what other argument is there that people have been given a custodial sentence and by default merit a whole other bunch of rights and liberties to be removed from them deserve the right to vote other than it is a human right. I am intrigued to hear your personal belief as to why people in prisons should be given the right to vote. I suppose that it comes down to the very long-running arguments about what the purpose of punishment is. We generally separate that out into issues around deterrence, deterring other people from committing a crime, passing a sentence in order to deter other people. I would question whether the loss of the right to vote is a significant deterrent to crime. Another purpose of punishment is the protection of the public from those who pose a serious threat against members of the public. I would question whether deprivation of the right to vote protects the public in any way from the commission of other crimes. Some people say that punishment in itself is a purpose, an objective rather than something that is being carried out. I think that purpose is the means, not the end. Those who say that punishment is an end in itself, I would part company with almost a philosophical or ideological level. Even to them, I would say, is the loss of the right to vote a significant punishment to very many people? Perhaps to a very active political activist, it might be seen as a significant punishment, but that is a relatively small proportion of the population. For me, the purpose of incarceration and the purpose of sentencing more generally ought to be principally around getting someone to face up to what they have done, to change and challenge their behaviour, and to ensure that they are willing to participate, or more likely to participate, as a member of society getting their life back on track and not committing offences in the future. To me, the signal that says that you are a member of this society and participating in the democratic process is a part of being a member of society. That seems to me to have far more positive to say about the place of prisoners voting than any argument that I have yet heard about anything that society gains from depriving people of the right to vote. Very quick final question from Gail Ross. Thank you. We can let you get off to your next committee, Mr Harvie. Thanks, convener. Good morning and thanks for coming along. It is indeed a fascinating subject. You may have seen in a specific newspaper this morning that there is a bit of hysteria that on polling day prisoners are going to be running all over the country, creating social unrest and escaping and not coming back. To go to the practical aspect that we touched on slightly, can you reassure people that this is an absolute nonsense, that they will not be getting let out, as was said? What are the practical aspects of voting within the prisons? Is it going to be a mixture of postal, proxy and polling stations, or would we be better concentrating on one aspect? How do you see it happening practically? Well, I suspect that you are referring to a newspaper that I rarely read but often enjoy offending, so I will try to catch up with what they have written later in the day. My suggestion would be that the Scottish Government, if it agrees with the argument that some change to the blanket ban is necessary, consults with the Scottish Prison Service and others about their preference for how that should be administered within the prison context. It might be that proxy voting is one way of doing it. Either a postal vote or some bespoke system for voting inside the prison context is easily achievable. The practical aspects of that are the least of our worries. The real objection that I think some people raise is that instinct of recoil that I talked about earlier. I simply do not think that that is a rational reaction given the way that we have changed sentencing policy in recent years, and, as Alex Cole-Hamilton said, it looks likely to continue changing sentencing policy. Thank you very much for your evidence this morning, Mr Harvey. We are very grateful to you for it, and we will let you go off to your committee, but we will endeavour to keep you updated on the work of this committee, given that you brought it to our attention in the first place. Once again, I thank you for your interest as a committee in that issue. Once again, I recall that earlier comment that I made in the opening remarks about seeing that in the context of wider equalities in human rights issues such as national identity, equalities, disability, gypsy traveller communities and so on. I think that there is a wider discussion to be had about franchise as well. We hear you. Thank you very much. I am going to suspend the committee for five minutes to allow us to change over our panel. Everybody comfortable? We will get kicked off again. Good morning, and we will come back to the Equalities and Human Rights Committee. We will continue on with our agenda item on prisoner voting this morning. As you can see, we have changed our set-up, and we have now what is called a round table. For your interest in information, the round table set-up is to allow a bit more of a free flow of information, so it is a bit less formal than the panel. You will need to catch my eye if you want in, and hopefully we will hear some really interesting evidence from you all this morning. That will be punctuated with some of the members of the committee who will come in and ask some direct questions. I am sure that they have them already for you. You will have heard Patrick Harvie's evidence this morning. Most of you were in the room this morning for that. You understand the genesis of the committee looking at this piece of work, so we are really happy to have you all around the table this morning. Thank you and very grateful for your written evidence that some of you passed us on. It gave us all lots of reading to do over the past couple of nights, but we are very grateful for that. What I am going to do is go around the table for you to introduce yourself and tell us where you are from, and that will give us a re-insight into who we have got around the table. I am Christina McKelvie and I am the convener of the committee. My name is Alex Cole. I am the vice-community of the committee. I am Tom Halpin. I am from SACRO, who works with rehabilitation of people in the justice system. Good morning, everyone. My name is Michael Clancy. I am director of law reform at the Law Society of Scotland. Good morning. I am Gil Ross. I am the MSP for Caithness, Sutherland and Ross. Good morning. I am Pete Walman. I am the chair of the electoral registration committee. The assess association is absenting 15 electoral registration offices in Scotland. I am David Strang, the Majesty's chief inspector of prisons for Scotland. I am Fergus Eiland, professor of criminology at the University of Glasgow and specialising in questions of punishment and reintegration. I am Lucy Hunter Blackburn. I am here on behalf of the Howard League for Scotland. Good morning, everyone. I am Mary Fee MSP for West Scotland. Good morning. I am Beverly Smith, ex-offender. Good morning. I am Jan Anderson. I am a shine mentor working with women offenders. Jamie Greene MSP. Chris Hike. I am secretary to the lateral management board who work with the return officers, lateral registration officers and the minister in the elections. Thank you very much. I am sure that Chris will have realised that there are lots of questions on practicalities that we may have come back to you on in the session this morning. I was hoping to kick off with the Howard League this morning because I know that you have had a long running campaign on this. Much like Patrick Harvie this morning, we are interested to know the aspects of why the committee should look at this, where we should look at it, how we should look at it and the reasons why we should look at it, which is the most important part of it. Lucy, I wonder if you wanted to kick off with your understanding of that. Thank you very much, convener. I think that I would want to echo a lot of what Patrick Harvie said. We come at this as a moral ethical case rather than a particular legal side. For us it is about how you conceive the right to vote and how you think of prisoners and how you bring those two things together. We start from the position that the right to vote is a really fundamental right. If you are going to take it away from people at all, you have to start with very clear reasons for doing that. You have to have really good sound reasons if you are going to do that at all. We have another side of the coin for us, which is what is the status of prisoners in society, and we still see them as citizens. The blanket ban to us is based on a concept of civic death for all that prisoners just aren't part of that, and we can't support that as a view that for us it's at odds with what we say elsewhere about rehabilitation about prisoners and integration of prisoners. I think that Patrick made all those points very clearly. That's our starting point, but how do we think of the right to vote and how do we think about prisoners? The way we do this at the moment doesn't reflect well on either of those, we take it away. The arbitrary list of the current ban can't be overstated. It has very arbitrary effects on people. Patrick mentioned a date of sentencing, how much time you spent on remand because you're only excluded from voting for the period that you're serving your sentence in prison. Someone who spent, say, eight weeks on remand might only be having three or four weeks when they're actually bound from voting because that's their sentence period, because when their diet falls their sentencing diet against their remand period. It's a very much more arbitrary system than I think many people appreciate, particularly when you include short-term prisoners. That's one thing to say. There is more generally our view about whether you can justify the basis for which how we've got here. If you look at the history of where we are, it hasn't been through a proper democratic debate about the vote and the prison system. It's been much more arbitrary in its own way, that process, so there wasn't a ban prior to 1969. When it was brought in, it was brought in with no parliamentary scrutiny really at all. There was a process behind closed doors in 1969 looking at electoral reform. There was no real debate, it was put into legislation then, and prior to that there was no ban at all for 20 years. If you go back further into 1949, it was only the most serious cases who were banned from voting. Indeed, from 1960 to 2000, we banned remand prisoners who were people who had not been convicted of any offence from voting. The history here is very much less coherent than many supporters of the ban tend to assume. For us, it's about having now a proper debate about where we draw those lines. It has to be an inclusive and involved debate. The opportunity is here for us in Scotland to do that and to come up with a system that is more defensible and above all more in line with what happens in most other democracies in Europe. That's where we start from. Tom Halpin, I want to come to you next. Obviously, part of the discussion earlier was about redemption and rehabilitation and participation as a citizen. I wonder if you can present the work that you do and maybe some of your thoughts on that topic. Thank you, convener. From the outset, I found the arguments and discussion promoted by Mr Harvie very encouraging and very fair. It generally captured the experiences that we have as an organisation, sacro, in our partners. We work across a number of organisations in public social partners at slight shine, which you'll hear about later, which gives us really extensive experience of working with the group that we're talking about. In terms of allowing them, helping them, supporting them, challenging them, coming to what changes they have to make in their lives. Those are real significant changes that lead to rehabilitation and reintegration into communities as an act of citizens. It takes us back to the ethical or legal argument and the moral arguments within that. The fundamental question is, who's moral compass are we using? That's defining people into good or bad. It just doesn't reflect the reality of the situation. The vast majority of people that we work with who come in under the term of offender quite quickly reappear at different parts of the system as victims. Those are citizens, first and foremost. The stories of working with people as they make those changes quite frankly are inspirational. When you get to the root causes of the situations that brought them into offending behaviour for so many, it comes back to real vulnerabilities, real issues of deprivation and lack of opportunity that are fundamentally what it's about. I can think of one man who I would describe him as the fighting drunk in the newspaper. I would probably describe him that as well. When you get through and work with this individual, you find that he has experienced horrendous stories of bereavement at a young age in his own family that he's never coped with. In actual fact, he's deeply distressed and traumatised by that. When you start working with him, he turns into being a leader within his cohort. His positive impact on those around him is a true inspiration. Someone like that, for example, we are working with going into really deep issues in their own lives and telling them they are disenfranchised at the same time at periods of their life. To tell them that they have a future as a citizen is an actual fact. If we can work with them, it might seem a mute point for so many that does anyone really care or whatever. It means an awful lot if you are trying to understand what your purpose is in life, why have you been deprived of all this opportunity and come into a view that you have a very positive future. That captures the essence of it in terms of the question of who's moral compass are you using. How did people get to that position? That's a good point. Jan, I was going to come to you next and maybe hear from Beverly after that on Shine and maybe your thoughts and reflections on a topic in front of us today. I've come to the topic quite fresh, really. It's not something that I thought about a lot before being invited to participate in the committee, but Bev and I got together and looked through the papers and we found it absolutely fascinating and we're really, really delighted to be here. I work with a population of women offenders, as they say. I would echo a lot of what Tom is saying. I could pretty much say that 100 per cent of the women that I'm working with are women who've experienced poverty, disadvantage and have a huge amount of psychological trauma abuse in their lives. In many ways, I would describe them as the walking wounded. They are people who are accruing services but quite often shut out of services or finding it hard to access services as well. I guess the word victim is one that I don't really like in a lot of ways, but I feel the population that I'm working with are troubled and traumatised people. In my experience, I've been doing this for nearly three years. Most of them are not voting, but it feels because they feel a long way away from society and services and don't really connect. However, we have had some discussions around the difference that the Government of the day makes to their lives and, particularly, the kind of issues that we're facing with people dealing with universal credit when they're coming out of custody, having to wait six weeks until they get benefit payments and things like that. I can see that people may become more politicised because of the things they're facing on their release. In reading through the papers some specific issues, I could see that issues to do with identifying the address of where somebody comes from could be a problem because a lot of the women I'm working with are homeless. They've been homeless before going into custody. They're facing homelessness when they come out, but it would seem that postal voting would be probably preferable to voting from the prison address. Maybe those are too big issues to get into, but we would certainly be interested in discussing things going forward if that was welcome. Sorry, I've run out on my thread there. Another issue that came up in the papers was whether there should be campaign awareness raising in prison. I love the idea of something like Custings. I think that it could be really positive work for there to be time in prison to engage the women in what some of the issues of the day are about, because certainly it would seem to me that it's a positive opportunity for looking at rehabilitation and reintegration. That's probably enough for now. I think that it's a really good segue into what I think that we are hoping to hear from Beverly this morning. Is your experience Beverly and your thoughts on this? I feel being in prison myself that there are many people in prison who really are not interested in voting, but there's a wide variety of people that would like to vote. Not only that, I feel that depending on sentences, if it's a short sentence, then these people are going to be reintegrated back out into society, so therefore they should be allowed to vote. I think that people who are on longer sentences don't know how many years that would be for other people to decide, but they're not making a contribution to society, so what right do they have to vote, and that comes from an ex-con myself. I think that the system of voting is easily manageable in prison. I've seen the way that prison works. It has certain regimes. The thing about the address of voting, I think that next of kin should be the person, whatever address they're next to kin, so I think that that's a good idea for that address to be used. I really don't have too much to say at the minute. I haven't had too much time to think about things, so I'm better with questions and then answering rather than speaking off like that. We're just about to go there and hear from some of the other panel members as well, but just catch my eye if you want back in. Alex, do you want to come in at this point? Yes, thank you, convener. I was really struck by the point that Tom Halpin made, that John Anderson took up subsequently, which was the fact that we often forget about the backgrounds that have led people to offending behaviour and the reasons for ending up in prison. I'm always struck by the horrific statistics of the proportion of people who are in the prison system right now who have been through the care system. Those are people who have suffered the failures of public policy and it is only at the nexus of that journey that they end up having their right to influence public policy removed from them. I think that offenders in prison, particularly those who have been through public care and other aspects of public support, which has let them down and led in part to their offending behaviour, have much to teach us in terms of the reshaping of public policy in this country. I have a specific question for those people who have experience of prison. I'm aware that we've got the inspector of prisons here, David Strang. I'd like to bring him as— David, it's next, Dr Speaks. Excellent. Maybe I can segue into him. I remember, from my undergraduate degree, that there's probably some great thing that is certainly far more intelligent than me. It might have been Russo or somebody, but he said that people are only ever free in a representative democracy in the five minutes when they're in the polling station casting their ballots and then they're after their slave to the whims of the government of the day. That's always stuck with me about the importance of voting. We are depriving people of liberty in more than one way, if we're incarcerating them and then denying them the right to vote. My question is that I have worked with many prisoners in my life and they all have strong opinions about their situation. Given that they have that voice, that leverage of the democratic process removed from them, what measures, what avenues are available to them to raise concerns about their situation and to make their voice heard right now? What avenues are available? Who's that directed to? I think it's an open question, but if you're going to bring David in next, as chief inspector of prisons, I think he'd be a great start. David. Thank you very much. I'll leave Professor Butneal to answer the academic question, I think. If I could make three brief comments. One of them is about the status of people in prison. The notion has been said a couple of times this morning that they are citizens, they are members of society. I say that in contrast to I know that in this Parliament when there was a debate before the Scottish referendum as to whether prisoners should be allowed to vote, I heard the phrase, when they return to society, then they'll be allowed to vote. I suppose I would want to make the point that they are part of society and it's important that we see them as part of the residents of Scotland. They happen to be in prison because of what they've done and they're being rightly punished by a court, but they don't lose that status as a citizen and a member of society. Secondly, I make the point about preparation for a release and rehabilitation. There's a huge emphasis on the Scottish prison service that I don't speak for, but it has a slogan about transforming lives and unlocking potential. The emphasis, and I think that what we all want, is that when someone leaves prison at the end of their sentence, they're less likely to re-offend, they're more likely to be a responsible citizen. In my mind, part of being a responsible citizen and modern studies classes at school know about this, that voting, taking part in the democratic process is part of what a responsible citizen does. I firmly support Patrick Harvie's letter and proposal, particularly for people coming to the end of a long sentence or people on short sentences that they should be allowed to register to vote as part of that preparation. Finally, the notion that if this is a punishment, it's a very arbitrary punishment, as I think that Jan and Beverly said, maybe not many people in prison would want to vote. I know that a lot of people in prison are not on the register, but some are really keen. I remember going back to 2014 in prison speaking to some men who were very animated by the referendum and had very strong views, as you would imagine, and didn't have a right to vote. In some senses, it's an odd punishment in that it only punishes those who would want to vote. If you're someone who's not registered and isn't interested in voting, there's no punishment for you at all because it doesn't change your life. We've got this imposition of a secondary punishment as well as the deprivation of liberty, but only on those who have an interest in voting. To answer Alex Cole's Hamilton's point about what avenues are there for people to raise issues and concerns, my counter would be to put an X in a box as not an effective way of raising your particular issue. Averdews are speaking to your MSP or MP and raising complaints through the Public Services Ombudsman and raising things with an independent prison monitor. Just on that, I absolutely accept that even with our proportional representation system in Scotland, there are times when voting is slightly futile even when you're not in prison, but the corollary to your statement there about it's not a very effective tool of achieving representation is the first thing you do is go and speak to or have your MSP come and see you, which I have done for prisoners in HMP Edinburgh. However, if you're not satisfied with the outcome of that meeting or if you don't feel that you're being heard to or your MSP refuses to come and see you, then you should have the right to change your MSP or at least try to, and I think that that's where my argument rests that I'd like to see that piece of the jigsaw included. If I can just respond, I 100% agree with you on that point. All I'm saying is that I've never said to a prisoner when he's complaining about his treatment. Well, when you get out, you vote for a different MSP. Professor McNeill, I wonder if you wanted to come in at that point and maybe deal with some of the academic points and some of your own thoughts and reflections? I'll try. In fact, I brought help on the academic points because in preparation, just over the course of the last day, I was looking on my bookshelves, as you do, and I found the book on this topic and I've been reading it with great interest over the last 24 hours or so. I knew about this work but hadn't properly engaged with it until preparing for the hearing, so I will leave this with you as a gift. This is Cormac Behan, who's a Cormac Behan PhD, who's at the University of Sheffield, and his PhD was on prisoner's politics and the vote. It picks up the case of Ireland, where legislation was passed in 2007 to enfranchise prisoners, as well as dealing with the moral arguments in a very even-handed way, although he does eventually reveal his own position in favour of enfranchisement. He reviews the position globally in terms of the countries that do and don't permit voting by people in prison, and he looks at the practical arrangements that were brought in Ireland and that are applied elsewhere. Then he does something really interesting, which is that he conducts 50 interviews with prisoners about politics and participation and voting in the wake of their enfranchisement in 2007, so the field work followed the change in the Irish legislation. It's an outstanding piece of work, even just reading the introduction and the conclusion would be tremendously helpful, I think, to members of the committee. If you proceed with this in some other fashion, this is a person who, clearly, you would want to consider as either a witness or potentially as an adviser if you're going down the line of considering an inquiry. Just to pick up on some of the more academic points, Rousseau was mentioned earlier, and he gets a reference in the book. Rousseau was not a fan of representative democracy, as you said. He was interested in direct democracy, and in fact, some of his ideas around the importance of political participation, political dialogue, political engagement and how that affects the civic health of a polity or a community or a society are very contemporary in the context of debates about Scotland, both in relation to the independence referendum, but also since then. For me, the fundamental problem is this. We've heard from the Howard League already that disenfranchisement was conceived of initially as a form of civic death, and Rousseau was also a fan of the idea of the social contract. Even before him, back in the days of the Greeks and the Romans, the idea was pretty straightforward. If you break the law, you'll lose the right to make the law. A person who steps outside of the social contract, who breaks the norms of the group, has to be excluded and shunned from participation in the political process. Originally, in ancient societies and through and to the Middle Ages, that was permanent. It was permanent in some context to the extent that your civic status was so demeaned by punishment that you no longer had the right to life. It wasn't that the state executed you. It's that anybody that could kill you if they wanted to do with impunity because you were now a non-citizen. That was the most brutal and extreme form of disenfranchisement. As we've moved forward, those extreme forms have diminished, but we have had this oscillation back to political disenfranchisement in the more recent history that we were hearing about from the Howard League. I've got big problems with the social contract argument philosophically. We could have a long talk about that, but I'll be really brief if I can about that. We heard some of it before. To pick up on something that Jan said, if we think of many people in the criminal justice system as, in a sense, carrying wounds or being, in her phrase, the walking wounded, I think that Jan was speaking about that in relation to questions of trauma or personal loss, but, civically, those are wounded people. They're already disenfranchised substantively before they're disenfranchised formally by punishment. They come from communities where their life opportunities are severely restricted, where health inequalities are profound, where levels of political participation are already minimal and deeply troubling, so they're civically wounded and then we apply to them as part of their punishment or as an accidental consequence of their punishment civic death in the form of full and formal disenfranchisement during their punishment and then, to make matters more absurd in my view, we insist that they resurrect themselves civically at the moment of their release and enter back into society fully prepared to make a robust and rounded contribution as a politically and civically engaged citizen, which is completely paradoxical. The problem arises from the fact that we're holding on to ancient and medieval sentiments that drive the desire to exclude and trying to have them at the same time as a kind of modern conception of reintegration and we can't have both. It would be my sort of fundamental view. Other problems with a social contract, it's arbitrary for the reasons that Patrick Harvie explained to apply it in the way that we do. If you wanted to look at a group of people who could legitimately be excluded from political participation, my first group to target would be tax avoiders. If you don't pay the tax, why should you have a say over how the tax is dispersed to the collective good? That's not an offence, strictly speaking. It's certainly not a crime that has prosecuted through the criminal courts unless it's full blown evasion, or that might indeed be a matter of civil law. Nonetheless, what we actually have is a society in which people who avoid their tax liabilities have profound influence in political processes, including through the funding of political campaigning. We take civically wounded people and remove all their rights to participate in regard to that as somehow just—there are absurdities for me in the social contract position more broadly. Just to finish and to move on to what I think the legal position is, and I'll say that I'm not a legal expert, I'm not a law academic, but all that the European judges were arguing is that it's wrong to have an arbitrary ban. If we are going to exclude people from political participation as a result of the imposition of a punishment of imprisonment, we need to justify it. That's all that they said—justify it. The basis of their argument is that the punishment is the deprivation of liberty, and nothing that is not an inevitable consequence of the deprivation of liberty is entailed by the deprivation of liberty, and that's a principle that they apply across a range of issues in respect of the continuing civil rights of prisoners. So they said to us or to the UK Government directly, decide. You make law to determine who you want to exclude from the political process, or you get your judges to disqualify people from voting and make it an explicit and public and transparent part of them being punished. Both of those positions are fine, they're tenable, they can be argued, I personally disagree, but I could live with it if we were prepared to justify it. It's the fact that we're prepared to do it thoughtlessly, routinely, that I find particularly problematic and without even any discussion of the question of any link to the offence. My view would be that the current position is philosophically inconsistent to the point of being morally wrong and absurd. It's not that we can't exclude people from the process, it's just that we have to, as was said by the Howard League, be much more careful about deciding if, how, when and who we do that to. You've given us a lot to think about. Everyone round the table, thank you so much. Mary, you wanted to come in at this point. Thank you, convener. It almost falls on from the point that has just been made. I'd be interested to hear all of the panel's views on whether we should be looking at a ban that is linked to type of crime and length of sentence, because I struggled to understand how you can justify a complete blanket ban and removal of the right to vote. I just simply don't understand why we should do that. I would be interested in other panel members' views on how we should apply a ban if we are applying any ban. The other question that I would like to pose is about the practicalities of allowing prisoners to vote, because some prisoners do vote. It would be good to get on the record the process around prisoners who are on remand and how they vote, and the practicalities of how that is managed within the prison. Can I bring Michael Clancy in at this point, who can give us a wee background as to how we arrived at the position in law and maybe answer some of the legal questions, and then come to the two members of the panel who are interested in the practicalities and bring that together with Michael Clancy? I would not profess to be an expert as to how the representation of the People Act 1983 came into being, but what we heard earlier this morning from Lucy and Professor McNeill is clearly something that tells us about the way in which civil disability was imposed as an incident of judicial decision making. The point that Lucy made about civil death is quite an interesting one that was picked up by Fergus. It is that courts could determine that people could be civilly dead. Why was that? Because, of course, there was a death sentence in place for most of that time. I was reflecting on how divorce in Scotland was created by the reformers in the post-1560 period because you could get divorced on the basis of adultery. Adultery was a crime. The decision of the criminal court because it carried a penalty of death meant that the surviving partner was able to remarry even if the sentence had never been carried out because the court had determined that the person was subject to a sentence of death and therefore they were civilly dead. The other party was free to marry. I just showed you what imagination people can bring to the law. Imagination is something that we have got to perceive off here. The real issue revolves around the European Convention on Human Rights. The High Contracting Parties undertake to hold free elections at reasonable intervals by secret ballot under conditions that will ensure the free expression of the opinion of the people in the choice of the legislature. That is the article on which free elections are based. That is a reaction to the unfree elections that were perpetrated on Europe, principally under the Nazi regime, but other dictatorships as well. Then, when the European Convention came around reminding everyone once more that the United Kingdom was a motivating factor in the creation of the European Convention, we were able to say that that is not the way that we expect Governments to behave now. That formulation is the derivation of the starting point from which the issues about eligibility to vote stem in the context of the number of court cases that have been taken to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg over the past few years. Everyone knows about the case of Hearst, so I won't reiterate that too much, but there are key factors that you would want to reflect on that can be found in paragraph 82 of the judgment, and it goes to the issue of the blanket restriction on voting. The provision imposes a blanket restriction, say the judges, on all convicted prisoners in prison. It applies automatically to such prisoners, irrespective of the length of their sentence and irrespective of the nature or gravity of their offence and their individual circumstances. Such a general, automatic and indiscriminate restriction on a vitally important convention right must be seen as falling outside any acceptable margin of appreciation, however wide that margin might be, and as being incompatible with article 3 of protocol 1. Why is that important? Because of course that determines, that gives us the answers to unlock the key of how to make something comply with article 3 protocol 1. In other words, do not be indiscriminate, not to be a blanket restriction, do not apply automatically, do not have it irrespective of the length of the sentence, do not have it irrespective of the nature or gravity of the offence. Those are the keys that you use to unlock the position that we are now in, and the position that we are now in is that, as a matter of general principle, the UK should seek to comply with its international obligations, including those under the European Convention on Human Rights, and I think that it is quite important that we seek to get to that position, because fundamentally this is a rule of law issue. If it comes to the Scottish Parliament looking at exercising the powers that apply under the Scotland Act 1998 now in terms of elections, then we have to bear in mind certain factors. Section 29 to D requires the compliance with ECHR, and if a law is made that is not compatible with ECHR, then it is not law under section 29. We also have to bear in mind that those areas of the law are protected subject matter areas, because the protected subject matter provisions in sections 30 and 31 of the Scotland Act make it clear that, when the Parliament would be looking at provisions for electors, the Presiding Officer has to identify that, and then if a bill is not passed, unless there is a number of members voting to the extent of two thirds of the number of MSPs. Those are some of the factors that we have to bear in mind. Of course, the UK Government has tried to look at this in the past. The Voting Eligibility Prisoners Bill in 2013, which was a draft bill, did not go very far, but it got at least to the position where options were put before parliamentary committees. It would be useful to look at those options again. They seemed to focus exclusively on the term of sentence, which might not meet the unlockability requirements in terms of Hearst, but bearing in mind that, according to the leaflet issued by the European Court of Human Rights, prisoners' rights to vote, it is not as good a present as leaving a book, but I might leave it anyway. You can read there that it is issued by the court in Strasbourg, and it talks of the seven UK cases and then the six other cases from the rest of Europe. What can I say in addition to that, but that we have to think hard about how to make our system comply with the law to which we have agreed in terms of the European Convention? Absolutely fascinating, as usual. I am with a bit of history, but it is up to me, as usual, as well. Now, if we can get to some of the practicalities. If you want to start and we can maybe get some insight from Chris, you will have heard some of the aspects of the practicalities of this this morning, so please enlighten us. Okay, maybe if I start quickly with how Raman prisoners are dealt with at the moment. If they are on Raman for a short period of time, they can simply remain registered at their own address. They are not really absent away long enough to break that resident connection. Alternatively, they register by way of declaration of local connection, that is an annual declaration, and they declare to their previous address, or if they are homeless, they just to address near a place where they spend a substantial amount of that time out there during the day of the night. That is how that process works at the moment. We tend to find that most decorations come ahead of an election. That tends to be at the point that Raman prisoners will opt into the registration process. The important thing to bear in mind, it goes to the local, not to the registration officer where the prison is, but the registration officer where the person was previously resident or where they had a connection to. I think that that leads me into address and whether you register and how that shows. If you declare to local connection that your address does not actually appear in the register, you simply appear at the end of the relevant section under the section other electors and you just your name appears, your address does not appear. I think that a point to consider would be if prisoners were registered at the prison, then the address of the prison would appear and their name would appear against it if it was done in the same way as a normal residence. Registers or electors have long shelf lives and I think that that is something to perhaps bear in mind. The references being made to maybe not removing the blanket ban but linking it to length of sentence. I think that one practical issue for electoral registration officers would be how would they know which prisoners were enfranchised and weren't enfranchised. Again, that is very much a practical issue. It would need just a bit of thought as to how that information would be communicated. I think that from electoral registration officers' viewpoints there are no fundamental barriers. I think that care needs to be taken to consult widely with all stakeholders as to how that could actually be delivered to make sure that if any system was brought in that it was a system that worked and worked as efficiently as possible for both the elector and for the administrators. I think that that probably sums up our position but I'm happy to take any questions. Thank you very much. Chris Hicops, do you want to give us your insight? Just to follow up on what Pete said, and it's clear in both of our written submissions that we're not here to talk about what should be. We're here to comment on how that would be implemented and it's for you to determine what the show and we'll talk about the how. When you look at the mechanics, the logistics of running the election, there are issues of who can vote and there's issues of how they vote so that the who's in the house. The electoral registration officer is very much concerned with who is on the electoral roll, who is allowed to vote and there are a lot of issues there about getting on the roll, maintaining that role, how that is compiled and composed. Then it's into how that vote is done, how people actually go and cast their vote in practice. It's worth remarking that policy has changed on both of those over time. Who's allowed to vote has come from people-owned property to just men, to women, to 16 and 17-year-olds, so policy does change and as policy changes and law changes, administrators like ourselves are tasked with delivering it and we do. Those sort of changes are generally the product of both the philosophical debate that we have here and consultation. I think that it's essential that there is consultation and there's input on the mechanics of these things in the medium term because you'll draw out a lot of practical issues from a variety of sources that are broader than the people in this room. In terms of who, that's one and also about how people vote, you look at the growth of postal voting over recent years where it's very much now postal voting on demand, but associated with that even the method of postal voting has changed in reaction to widespread electoral fraud now allegedly so people have had to put a signature on a date of birth on the postal votes to prevent what's happening in certain places, so that the mechanics do change. In terms of how people vote, in the written evidence report they were taught about how people currently vote so there's postal voting, there's proxy voting where you nominate a trusted individual to vote on your behalf and there are rules about that and while they might want to comment on how a proxy is appointed and the way in which someone is qualified to be a proxy and that could be something interesting to draw out. People can vote in person at a polling place and I think we've talked about some of the issues that might arise around that and the concerns that might be felt if the polling place is out with the prison. If the polling place is within the prison the issue then is that there are awesome issues then about the nature of the franchise. If the franchise was such that people were registered all over the UK where you'd have 30, 40, 50 ballot boxes and lots and lots of different ballot papers that people would have to get the right one. Postal voting would seem like the obvious approach and I think it's what's done in Ireland at the moment for those that qualify. Postal voting itself is not without difficulty and it's not without cost. At the moment I think it's about 20 per cent of the electorate of register that is vote by post and it varies across constituencies. The actual mechanics of postal voting could be made to work in a prison situation I'm sure but there would have to be provision for some of the elements that exist in postal voting at the moment, the replacement of spoiled or lost postal votes. Normally someone can turn up at the return officer's office and say, I've spoiled my ballot paper, I'm going to have another one. And if we get the old ones back and proof of identity we'll give them new ones. Obviously that wouldn't work to the same extent. So there are certain technical issues we'd have to look at but the overall notion of postal voting could be made to work. It's interesting to read the submission from the Scottish Prison Service on how they apply that at the moment for prisoners on remand. We mentioned in the paper we've put there one of the fundamentals away from the human rights paragraph that was mentioned by Professor Clancy there around the people having a right to vote in secret and I think we sometimes sway away from the fundamental secrecy of their ballot and it is interesting to read in the submission from the Scottish Prison Service talking about how the postal vote is completed by prisoners on remand. That is something that is of concern. There are steps taken to ensure that the vote is made in secret. It's always something that we do want to preserve is that the votes are private and should be free from influence and free from bullying or threats from other people around how someone's casting a vote. I suppose in summary it's for you to determine what should be, we'll do what you tell us but practically there are issues to address but we could tease those out through consultation and through work around that. I have to say that's a phrase we don't hear often. Pete Wildman, do you want to give us a wee update on proxy voting just for the record? Yeah, a person is entitled to point another person to be their proxy. I cast their vote for them but the other person must be a registered elector and they must be registered within Scotland. The other issue is that a proxy can only be proxy for two people unless they're a close family member in which the limit does not apply. The rules are that anybody can apply for proxy up to six working days prior to the election. After that date there's strict rules on emergency proxies and they're limited to occupation service and employment or health issues and it really would be just to make sure in terms of ordinary proxy that the prisoner's option, that option was available to them and that the law allowed them to obtain a proxy vote easily. I haven't got the room in front of me but I'm not aware of any barriers to that. Okay, thank you. I'm quite keen to open up because we've heard from everyone this morning and I'm keen to open up if any of our colleagues have got questions or if you've got other things that you would like to add to the discussions this morning. Lucy? I wonder if one thing we've touched on a few times is the role of public opinion in all of this and I wondered if I could say a word or two about our experience at Howard League of campaigning on this around the referendum bill because it was very surprising to us. I thought that the public is one of the sacred cows of criminal justice, often deferred to but never consulted Professor Richard Corn. You hear a lot about the public who wouldn't stand for change. We campaigned quite a high profile way in 2013. We deliberately sought to get press coverage across papers with a range of readerships and what really struck us was how little the heather went on fire, if you like. There wasn't a sense of great public outrage that was being raised. I think that the public is massively underestimated what the public is capable, the kind of debate they're capable of having around criminal justice. This is a common theme of criminal justice academia but it's also, I think, our true... We asked the journalist, did you get many complaints about this piece? No. I gather that we spoke to Alison McKinnis and Patrick Harvie, did you get an awful lot of hostile stuff in your inbox about the amendments? No. Public opinion polling such as there is suggests about one third of the public already and in a really hostile press environment generally already support some lifting of the blanket ban. I think this is an important point not to be afraid of raising a debate and also not to make the snake of not involving the wider public, involving people in this debate because if you're talking about the vote and citizenship, this is exactly the moment at which you need to take people with you. I just wanted to make that point also just to say, Westminster have done big public consultation on the bill that Michael Clancy mentioned and they got 31 submissions, just 31 across the whole of the UK on the supposedly hot topic of which three have posed change. So it's really worth feeling at K8 that there is a space to have this debate, I think, at the point that I wanted to make. Any other comments from Tom? Just to reiterate the point about public confidence, we have significant experience in terms of community sentences and supervision of unpaid work for example and time and time again, the initial engagement with the local community raises all the questions, the fears that you would expect but actually the biggest issue we've got at the end of that consultation is meeting the increased expectations and the demands for assistance from people who are doing that type of work. So an informed public is very engaged. The only point around is the divide in the type of offence rather than the length of a sentence or whatever. I just want to talk about the type of offence. The reality is that it's a very blunt tool to use the actual crime as a title. The tragedy involved in many homicides and both sides impact on a woman who has spent her life of being abused who ends up in a very tragic circumstance in the court. You could say that taking someone's life as the most heinous crime is at the top of the tree but in those circumstances would you apply it there and that could go through into crimes of acquisition for real poverty. I just really throw up an alarm bell around using the type of crime as the arbiter. My remark has come very handsomly on the tale of what Tom just said. It's a great segue into the discussion that I've been having in my head. I tend to do that quite a bit. However, this session has been incredibly helpful for me in cementing my own view that, as I personally see it, we should lift the blanket ban in its entirety. I come down to a couple of things that have been said. First, around the notion of civic death, it's a bit like that old joke that you can't be half pregnant and you can't be half dead. Either we say that custodial sentence leads to civic death or it doesn't. It's a binary equation for me. Professor Fergus made a really elegant remark, which I think is yours, but you might have been reading it, that nothing that is not inevitable as a result of the deprivation of liberty should be included in punishment. For me, that sums up our approach to custody in this country and that the removal of the franchise is an arbitrary by-product of that. It may not actually happen. You could serve a three-year prison sentence and never lose your right to vote given on the timing of electoral cycles, so it does strike me as arbitrary. As such, I do not believe that, even if it's an incremental approach to lifting the ban, that doing so for the length of sentence or severity of sentence or severity of crime would be an appropriate way to do it because of the inconsistency of the application of sentencing by the Scottish courts and, indeed, the nature of offences that might come up and the interpretation of the law around that. For that reason, convener, I'm completely convinced. No more a declaration than a question, Mr Cole-Hamilton. Jamie Greene I'm trying to take stock of the various views around the table. Given that there seems to be consensus that no one's particularly against the concept of changing the status quo, it strikes me that there's really a spectrum here. At one end of the spectrum is the status quo where there's a blanket ban. At the other end of the spectrum, there's a complete reversal of the ban and, by default, everyone and anyone who is eligible to vote can vote. Then there seems to be a lot of places in the middle. I guess some of the factors that are jumping out at me is that this is a very three-dimensional thing in terms of who can or can't vote. Some of the parameters, for example, type of offence, have been mooted. Other things that strike me are whether the sentence is custodial or non-custodial, which seems to be the status quo. There's a little bit of discussion around length of sentences, whether they're short or long, which I think you touched on. I think that even falling on from that is the other dimension of where the person sits within the cycle of their sentence relative to electoral cycle itself. What I mean by that is the example given that, if someone is in a long sentence by which the term of the election that they are eligible to vote in or may vote in is not relevant to them because they will still be in custodial sentence by the end of that electoral cycle, does that have any effect on their ability to vote or, by default, their interest in voting at all? There seems to be a lot of unpicking to be done and I'm quite keen to hear more views on the parameters that we use. Do we just go from one end of spectrum to the other, or do we try and find somewhere in the middle that meets the criteria of some of these quite complex dimensions? I think that even added on to that is maybe a fourth dimension, which is the arbitrary application of it. Is it mandatory primary legislation that takes the rules? Do judges have an element of arbitrary decision making in this, if, for example, you're going down the route of offence-led rather than sentence-led? I think that it's clearly very complex, but I'm keen to explore perhaps what kicked us off. The thought process was what you said around people who are in long sentences, whether they should have the right to vote and whether it even affects them if they are not leaving prison during the cycle of that electoral term anyway, so I'm really keen to hear more thoughts and ideas around that. Beverly, do you want to come in? Is there anything to say? I think that I already said that people who are serving longer sentences are not contributing to society. Is there any immediate effect of any changes of any elections? That's really it. On that point, there's a paradox in the social contract position. If you break the rules, you can't make the rules, which relates to the question of whether a person is in custody for the full term of a Government, should they have a say over the composition of that Government through the parliamentary election? One of the conundrums for the people who report the social contract position is that what that means is that that prisoner has no say in the laws that are formed to which they will subsequently be subject. Since they didn't play any part in the political process that created the laws by which they are bound, should they be bound by those laws? Philosophers genuinely regard that as a significant problem and even a contradiction in the social contract area. You could and that is why people like Rousseau and others argue that it's not just a question of electing a representative body, it's a question of real political participation that underlines consent to being governed. In the absence of consent, all the states doing is exercising power illegitimately on people who don't opt into that. There are big questions at stake, but on a more practical point, just to pick up on what Tom is saying, I'm slightly torn on the question of judicial discretion over disqualification. Just to make it clear, what the European judges are arguing for is that the punishment must fit the crime. That's not a question of severity of the crime, it's a question of the nature of the crime. Disenfranchisement is a political punishment, so the crime to which it should be applied should be a political crime. Misconduct in a public office, a political office, offences against acts that seek to govern the proper conduct of elections, those would be the sorts of things that might feasibly, logically lead to disenfranchisement as a punishment. The mere fact that the crime is serious or serious enough to warrant a long prison sentence doesn't create a logic for disenfranchisement, according to the view of the European judges if I've understood their position correctly. As I said, I'm not a lawyer, so I'm probably straying into territory that I shouldn't, but that's my understanding. Excuse me, I wanted to comment on the two briefest contributions that seem to suggest that the law would only affect people after they've left prison, but it absolutely affects them while they're in prison, so changes to early automatic release for long sentences, for instance, and another example. The Scottish Prison Service has announced that, by the end of next year, every prison in Scotland will be smoke-free, which they're not at the moment. That's as a direct consequence of decisions made in this building. Laws passed by politicians locally and nationally do have an impact on people's lives while they're in prison. To return to the point about seven sentences in which they will not be liberated during the time of that Parliament, there's the interest that that person has in terms of their own disenfranchisement, but there's a huge—if a fellow organisation of families outside were here, they would be making the point about families affected by imprisonment, which immediately opens up those real interests that people have for what's happening and impacts on them around it. If you go and look at what aids assistance and reducing re-offending—we've had Scottish Government research into what works in the academic research—what we do know is that that relationship with family is hugely important to someone having a positive future, so I just want to make that point around someone who's not outside in the community still has a reason to be enfranchised. I was very struck with Professor McNeill's understanding of what the law requires of his microphone and I'm wondering whether you can confirm that. I think that that's exactly right that you get cases in Italy, for example, where it's been electoral fraud that people have been involved in, and that results in disenfranchisement. There may then be a case for entering into some kind of discussion with the Sentencing Council as to whether that would be the sort of thing, but, of course, at the moment, it doesn't come up like that. It's not an add-on, it's not an option, it is a consequence. Therefore, I think that Parliament and the Government have to make up their minds as to which route they want to follow. Then you can figure out the other consequential changes that will be necessary. Criminologists refer to that phenomenon as the collateral consequences of punishment. I think that you used the term incidental. It's not necessarily an intended and deliberate part of the punishment that's imposed, but it's just something that happens as a result of it. People like me who study processes of desistence, so how and why people stop offending and achieve successful reintegration, are very concerned with collateral consequences, because there's overwhelming evidence internationally that the collateral consequences of the punishments that we intend, so the unintended aspects of the penalties that we impose, produce profound barriers to the outcome that we wish the punishment to secure, which is ultimately the successful reintegration of the person as a law-abiding member of society. I thought that I would just maybe read in a single short quote from a serving prisoner in Ireland who was interviewed by Cormac, and he opens his whole book with this comment, which gets to the nub of the issue in a sense in terms of the impact on people of political participation in prison. This comes from Gavin, who was serving life when he was interviewed, and he says, voting allows the prisoner to feel part of a wider community, something incarceration takes away. It also allows the prisoner to vote for and against changes which may affect his or her time in custody and on release. I hope that our vote is not a wasted one. If we're valued enough to be asked to vote, then I hope that our wants, needs and requests are listened to. Being in custody takes away a large part of a person's feeling of self-worth. Being allowed to vote gives back some of that lost feeling. This, in turn, will make better citizens, he hoped. Most criminologists would probably argue that infranchisement is important symbolically just as expressed by Gavin there, but it's only the beginning. If we really want to support desistence from crime and reintegration, then much more practical efforts to create more substantial forms of infranchisement, engagement and participation are required. That is the thrust of Scottish penal policy at the moment, so it's inconsistent—the position in relation to voting is inconsistent with the general thrust of our policy just now. David Adam. I'll just add an example of the collateral impact of a prison sentence. It is in relation to people trying to get employment after they've left prison. The sentence was a prison sentence, so they've lost their liberty for four years or six years or whatever. We talk about the debt being paid to society, but the cost of that, the impact continues, because it is much more difficult to get employment if you've got a criminal conviction and a prison sentence behind you. That's just another example. No-one designed it that way, but that's a consequence. It absolutely acts against all the best practice of rehabilitation and reintegration. If someone can't get a job, it completely goes against it. It's not just an unfortunate consequence, but it's a very damaging consequence. I'm sort of bumping up to the end of our time this morning, but Michael, do you want to come in? I think that some of the discussion that we've had in the last few minutes has emphasised exactly how important the right to vote is. There is a danger sometimes that we might forget what a struggle it was for people to obtain the right to vote. A struggle in which people in this room will know people who participated in that struggle. I think that that's quite important for us to reflect on, and that we, as citizens—not residents but citizens—have that right to vote as determined by law, and that participation in the democratic project is something that we've got to remember. When we talk about having the right to vote, everyone has the right to vote. The act of disenfranchisement is an action of the state to remove that right, and we shouldn't forget exactly what their relationship is all about there. I hope that you agree with me that that's a good place to finish our evidence this morning, and I give our grateful thanks from myself and the committee members for all of your evidence this morning. You've given us some very clear routes that we have to pursue, which we will talk about after we go into private session this morning, but I am very grateful for your assistance in this inquiry this morning. If you go away and you think, I should have said this, or I should have asked that, or I should have made that, please get back in touch with the clerks. As you see, this will be an issue that will be on-going for a while in committee, because we have to come up with some resolution. I thank you so much for your participation. I am going to suspend committee now to go into private.