Public Perceptions & Attitudes Towards Prisoner Disenfranchisement in England and Wales

By Beth Allcock,

Loughborough University

The disenfranchisement of prisoners is a contentious debate within the court of public opinion. Despite longstanding controversy, there has been little in the way of study into the public opinions and attitudes towards prisoners accessing their ‘protected’ human rights; the right to vote and the right to marry. This paper explores whether contextualised information surrounding the interpersonal characteristics of prisoners holds any influence over public opinions and attitudes as to whether it is appropriate to strip prisoners of their human rights. Although previous research has explored public views on prisoner disenfranchisement, it fails to understand how individual prisoner circumstances can influence public views in relation to access to their rights. Purpose-built vignettes were created to investigate whether public opinions and attitudes towards prisoner rights hold up in practice, and to understand whether certain characteristics hold more weight than others. Although the public sample (N=53) displayed opinions supporting the enfranchisement of prisoners, the results from the contextualised vignettes displayed that the interpersonal characteristics of prisoners were more influential when applying these opinions in practice. This paper identifies that the contextualisation of prisoners as individuals does hold influence over public opinion towards prisoner disenfranchisement. However, this cannot be applied as a one-size-fits-all approach. Each interpersonal characteristic was found to hold different weighting within each human right explored and these findings were further considered within the age, gender, and occupation of the sample base. The findings of this study shed light onto the ongoing controversy and debate surrounding prisoner disenfranchisement and establish the importance of interpersonal characteristics of prisoners in settling the public discourse surrounding prisoner rights. 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17219286

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