Catching up on the current political state of play, I caught sight over at Iain Dale's blog and New Right that prisoner's having the right to vote was presently a running story. I don't know how I feel about this, but if it were to be implemented I'm pretty certain I don't want it geographically based, with prison potentially transforming certain seats against the interests of their law-abiding residents. Prisoners will have rather different interests to the broader population, so why not represent them differently?
Something that has always fascinated me about British politics in ages past was university seats. Could a similar model be adopted for prisoner's representation? The BBC put the prison population of the UK at just below 90,000, which could produce either one larger-than-average seat or two smaller seats. Prisoner's get representation, law-abiding citizens don't have their representative split with felons who have rather different priorities, and we all get to see what sort of candidate each party would choose to run for Her Majesty's Prisons (UK Parliament Constituency).
