given how little one vote matter, it seems to me that stripping felons of their right to vote is both petty and counterproductive if the point was to reform them into civic minded individuals ?
given how little one vote matter, it seems to me that stripping felons of their right to vote is both petty and counterproductive if the point was to reform them into civic minded individuals ?
Also, seems kind of scary that this implies a future where so many people are in prison that their vote could actually tip the balance ?
Creating a class of prison slaves who have no right to vote with no possibility of upward mobility is a feature, not a bug. Add to that the difficulty of obtaining affordable healthcare/tying it to a job, gutting education, making child labor legal, making abortion illegal, etc., etc., and that plan becomes pretty obvious.
You're assuming that the point of the American justice system IS to refrain and rehabilitate. It's not.
A for-profit prison system seriously is low-key the most fucked up thing in a country full of fucked up things.
American prisons exist to make a profit for their investors. They do this by both government subsidies (which are calculated per inmate) and using the prisoners as cheap labor that they legally only have to pay pennies.
The system NEEDS a continuous influx of prisoners (slaves) to remain profitable. Rehabilitation is anathema to that.
It us not just petty or counterproductive. It is violating the basic principle of democracy itself.
When you also can escalate certain crimes (like cannabis) to target portions of the population it gets pretty dystopian already.
One vote might not matter much, but 4.6 million votes can swing elections. It’s really fucking weird how that country calls itself a democracy when it does this, allows rampant gerrymandering, have a very uneven vote weight depending on where you live, and, just as icing on the cake, allows slavery in some specific instances.
If people who break laws can't vote, and the government decides what the law is and appoints the judges who enforce those laws, then the government currently in power can decide who gets to vote. Obviously there's an incentive there to make laws that disproportionately affect those who weren't going to vote for you, and thereby remove most of your opposition's votes. That way lies dictatorship.
It also makes it hard to change bad laws. For a random example, there used to be laws against homosexuality. How do you think LGBT acceptance in law would be doing if anyone who was openly gay or trans lost their right to vote? How do you improve access to abortion if anyone who has an abortion, provides an abortion, teaches young people about abortion, or seeks information about abortions becomes unable to vote? How do you change any unjust law if the only people who can vote are those who are unaffected - or indeed, those who benefit from the status quo?
the point was to reform them into civic minded individuals ?
That was never the point.
Rehabilitation has never been the goal. The goal is free labor pool and punishment. The cruelty is the point.
There are already enough potential voters who have been imprisoned, not the future, such that they could tip the balance. If you're not sure if this is case, just look at how hard the GOP acts to block reinstatement of voting rights for ex felons.
The point is not reform, it's punishment.
Yes, it's counterproductive and the recidivism rate in the US is terrible as a result.
It works this way by design.
I've never understood this. What're they gonna do? Vote to make crimes legal?
Not just voting but having that blot on the record FOREVER puts a scarlet letter on their forehead. Good luck getting a good job and having a future when you've been in prison a few years for a nonviolent drug crime that should've been solved with a few weeks/months of inpatient rehab. Our entire criminal justice system in the US just breeds more crime and generational cyclical poverty. Hooray.
The united states already imprisons so many people, and unevenly at that.
That title needs a lot of editing. It does end in a question mark, but it's structured like a statement. Even if it is a question, it appears that your asking if it seems that way way to you. How is anyone else supposed to know how it seems to you?
I do feel like that gives an incentive to get people of the opposite party into prison to influence the election.
1 vote on its own doesn't matter, however, the collective vote of undesirables in a country with the highest incarceration rate on earth could really fuck shit up for the elites who seek to control the population.
Most people would rather vilify than forgive.
Stripping felons of the right to vote was/is a part of Jim Crow, wherein blackness was systematically criminalized, usually through forced poverty and then a criminalization of poverty (e.g. petty theft for survival). Similar to a poll tax, the goal was to prevent black people from having a political voice, including but not limited to electoral. This is why these laws are mostly in former slave states. They were a reaction to liberation. These anti-black policies also applied to anyone else that would be systematically marginalized, serving as a reusable tool for the ruling class. Make poverty itself a deep pit of disenfranchisement and all you need to do is make your targeted group poor enough. Keeping the poor and precarious from organizing politically is also a goal unto itself for the ruling class, though we shouldn't get overly invested in the idea that voting would ever be enough to actually properly contradict the ruling class itself.
The criminal "justice" system is not about reform, certainly not in the US. Every aspect of it makes it harder to reintegrate into society afterwards, usually with your record following you well into your life after leaving the prison. Getting a job, finding housing, applying for benefits, all of these will be seriously hampered by being convicted of a crime and serving time. Instead, the criminal system is designed, again, to marginalize. Take the people that are a threat to the perceived interests of business owners and isolate and harm them, also attempting to create the appearance of a deterrent so that others don't want to threaten private property interests. This impetus poisons the entire system even when it deals with crimes that are not directly crimes of poverty or capitalist alienation (though the societies and pain constructed by the ruling class are certainly their fault).
Please note, however, that the fact that so many people are disenfranchised already shows us that the ruling class isn't going to let folks vote them out or otherwise engage in the political policies necessary to address injustice. They won't let us solve the climate crisis or systemic unemployment or treating housing as an investment. The overt disenfranchisement is a blatant example of how they tip the scales in their favor, but it is far from the only one; most forms of disenfranchisement are so deeply ingrained that few people notice them as such. Poor or biased schooling so that the public will accept propaganda narratives. The maintenance of an economic underclass stripped of rights (such as undocumented immigrants). A requirement to work so many hours that you cannot rapidly gain political consciousness. A media apparatus wholly owned by the oppressor class and obediently taking orders from it on what to focus on, which reporters to hire and fire. The elimination of public squares and meeting places by which to organize. The cooption of academia through a variety of means, ensuring that their work suits the goals of the ruling class or is at least stripped of its capacity to organize against them. The limiting of the concept of political action to voting and going to cop-sanctioned protests. Etc etc.
The way out of this is to organize directly with one another, to use our organizations to (further) identify the material root causes of injustice, and to work with more than just the tools offered to us by those who already have power.
Given how little one vote matters, we have a much more serious problem here: why should any individual vote?
For any one person, the chance that even one election in their lifetime will have its outcome altered by their vote is vanishingly small.
Therefore, in terms of practical effect, each individual always faces this awareness: that whether and how they vote is purely symbolic in its effect
There are two tricky parts that come with allowing prisoners to vote that must be considered. Not hard stops, but just additional dynamics that will be in place.
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Prisoners have little to no autonomy, and can therefore be easily coerced into voting a certain way. If the warden/prison staff lean conservative and they hear that a certain prisoner voted liberal, that prisoner is vulnerable to reprisal. There would need to be an additional entity present in prisons to enforce privacy of voting results. But how do we guarantee that this government entity won't just collude with the other government entity running the prison?
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There may be problems in terms of where these votes are counted for. One way to protect the anonymity of prison votes is to pool them among the district that houses the prison. But do we let the prisoners vote for local candidates/laws when they are not locals? In many cases, prisons are located in very small towns and may therefore significantly skew local elections if they participate in them. So does everyone get an absentee ballot for their place of origin instead? Even if the duration of their sentence means they are likely never to go back there? Or do prisoners only get to vote on items/candidates at the federal level?
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