8. United Kingdom Independence Party Debate: Prisons and Prisoners

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:10 pm on 13 February 2019.

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Photo of Gareth Bennett Gareth Bennett UKIP 6:10, 13 February 2019

I think there is a basic—[Interruption.] There is a basic difficulty with prisoners on remand, but it's an interesting point that we need to look at.

Now, if I can return to what I was saying, conversely, there are English prisoners in Welsh prisons who won't be allowed to vote in an Assembly election. So, in many prisons, you will get prisoners on the same wing, some of whom will get a vote and others of whom will not. What you won't get is equality of opportunity, and the inequality may conceivably lead to lower morale on the wing rather than higher morale, so I think we do need to tread carefully here.

We did visit Parc prison, as John Griffiths mentioned. We did meet prisoners, we met prison officers and we met the prison director. Now, they do have a privileges system in that prison. I wondered would the privileges system be of any use in determining whether or not a prisoner might be allowed a vote—perhaps a naive idea. The prison director thought this was highly impractical and, on reflection, I think this would be unlikely given that you are then giving the prison director and the prison officers the right to say who can and who can't vote, which is probably itself fundamentally undemocratic. So, given all these difficulties, we are then led into the extremely murky waters of allowing all prisoners to vote. I really do think I agree with points that Mark Isherwood raised during the previous Chamber debate that the prospect of violent offenders like murderers and rapists getting the vote is not likely to win much support from the wider electorate. And he did quote again today the 9 per cent figure from a YouGov survey conducted in 2017. So, I think there will be very little public support for this. It wasn't in Labour or Plaid Cymru's manifestos; I think it's a bit rich trying to bring this in under the radar. Diolch yn fawr iawn.