In the debate over voting rights for prisoners (Report, 7 February), it is worth considering the contribution made by that famous convict, Oscar Wilde, to the question of prisoners' rights. Wilde was sentenced to two years' hard labour in May 1895 for "indecent behaviour" (homosexuality). Harsh conditions, deprivation and a serious fall from physical weakness all contributed to his death, aged 46, in 1900.
The immediate response to Wilde's conviction was one of those strange silences wished by the upper echelons of British society when it wants to forget unpleasantness, as in Tony Blair's "Time to move on from Iraq". Nonetheless, an estimated 2,000 men left England on the overnight boat to Boulogne on the news of Wilde's conviction. His final writings include The Ballad of Reading Gaol and The Soul of Man under Socialism and two long letters to the News Chronicle about prison conditions. In May 1897 he writes about the cruelty of imprisoning children under 14, of which there are several hundred in detention centres in Britain today. In March 1898 he indicts a system that condemns a prisoner to hunger, disease and insomnia. It is enough, he says, that punishment is loss of liberty. Imprisonment should not mean that a prisoner is stripped of intellectual rights, isolated from society, and censored in thought and deed.
Ann Elliot
London
• Given that going from parliament to prison is now such an established career move, surely one might have expected support from MPs for giving prisoners the right to vote (Leader, 10 February)?
Dr Martin Thomas
Faversham, Kent