ABSTRACT
When Richard Sauvé walked into a Port Hope, Ontario, bar on October 18, 1978, he could not have anticipated that the events of that night would lead him to prison for 15 years, to Queen's University to obtain an B.A. in psychology and criminology while in prison, and to the center of a political and legal battle that one commentator has said “reflects a controversy about what kind of state Canada is” (Hampton 1998: 23). On October 31, 2002, the Supreme Court of Canada brought 20 years of litigation by Sauvé and other prisoners to a successful end when a majority of the Court decided that denying the vote to prisoners violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms 1982. In striking down the prisoner voting ban, the Court explicitly rejected the notion that prisoners are “temporary outcasts from our system of rights and democracy” (Sauvé v. Canada [ Chief Electoral Officer]2002 at para. 40).
