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.
It’s a recipe for creating monsters similar to how intervention in the middle east created those terrorists and their symbiotic relationship with the military industrial complex. That plan is so ridiculously evil and doomed to fail that I can’t help but think there’s some second order effect that they’re going for here.
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.
When you also can escalate certain crimes (like cannabis) to target portions of the population it gets pretty dystopian already.
the point was to reform them into civic minded individuals ?
That was never the point.
Also keep in mind that they count those prisoners as part of the census, which affects how resources are distributed.
So they’re counted, but don’t get a vote. Ripe for abuse by unscrupulous politicians.
Oh shit, I never even thought about that. It’s another level of insidious. 1. Be republican 2. Get a huge prison in your district “for the jobs”, 3. Get more positions guaranteed to be republican, since the voters in your district still are. Would work for a democrat too, they don’t care about criminal justice reform either :(
Might work slightly better for republicans because they can work the identity politics angle more easily.
It’s almost like they shouldn’t be counted at all unless they are free to vote. But the states with significant prison populations wouldn’t go for that. Maybe we can compromise. Perhaps only 3 out of every 5 disenfranchised prisoners should count for representation purposes.
You’d have to eliminate children and immigrants too if you did that, but those new numbers wouldn’t reflect reality in most communities with so many people being excluded from the census.
Small quibble here, but illegal immigrants are absolutely counted in the census, obviously they are under-counted, but they are intended to be counted. No one is “excluded” from the census.
It also seems very undemocratic. The idea of democracy is that everyone can vote
True. But the US was founded by the rich, white elite for the rich, white elite.
Rehabilitation has never been the goal. The goal is free labor pool and punishment. The cruelty is the point.
Giving hoe little one vote matters…
Stop using this dumb mindset. Also there is more than 1 felon.
“one vote matters little” makes my blood boil, and I hope for it to never change as I get older.
It doesn’t matter though. We vote for the least bad option every 4-5 years and call that “democracy”.
I hate it when people say that I’m “throwing my vote away by voting for a 3rd party”. If everyone voted for the person they actually liked, rather than the person who’s likely to beat the other large party, maybe we’d see some better choices.
I don’t know what you are talking about. I am assuming you are talking about the USA.
Why would both be considered bad, but one least bad than the other? Having only two major parties makes for little choices, but why you think its never a good choice?
From what I can grasp from here in Europe, the current president Biden is not bad at all.
I live in Europe, even with more parties it’s still a matter of “least bad” usually - like here in Sweden I find it really hard to find a party that is anti-religion, anti-monarchy and pro-science and education but also not lenient on violent gang crime and open borders. I also disagree greatly with the current unfair rent control system and the high income taxes (with no property, land or inheritance taxes), but there is literally no party that covers even just those 3-4 issues in the same way (and there are like 5 or 6 viable parties!).
I think the bigger issue with Biden is that there’s just no change at all - no attempt to solve the biggest day-to-day issues of heatlhcare, housing and education. And from the point of view of Europe, Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act has been terrible, directly subsidising industry to move to the US, right when Europe is struggling with the Russian gas crisis and the pipelines were bombed, etc.
The united states already imprisons so many people, and unevenly at that.
77 million people have a criminal record ?? What the fuck
I’ve never understood this. What’re they gonna do? Vote to make crimes legal?
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.
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.
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.
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.
-
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?
-
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?
deleted by creator
-
