this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024
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Taking away the rights of felons to vote makes their incarceration unjust by its nature, and just makes them people trapped in cages by people with guns, might equals right. They'd still have to have a say in the laws that imprison them to be justly imprisoned. Also, if we cared about rehabilitation, spoilers: our culture is actually hostile to the concept, we'd be encouraging civic participation, not banning it.
But Americans have always had a raging, hateful ~~justice~~ vengeance boner to feel better about our own inadequacies in a nation built by slaves atop our genocide victims.
A civilized nation would want their citizens who made a mistake, often because society failed them, to be rehabilitated and thrive as their fellow citizens.
We don't do that here. Our ex-cons are set up for failure after already going in desperate. Then every conservative and a majority of neoliberals cheers when they do, like it's a victory for them.
You can talk about all the world's despots and dictators, but we still have the largest population of incarcerated citizens on Earth, and not even per capita. More of our people live in bondage than even China with its billion people. We found the...🤮...private profit in putting human beings in cages for any excuse.
For a country that began with "no taxation without representation" it's a huge hypocrisy to take away a person's voting rights yet expect him to continue contributing.
"A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals." - Dostoyevsky
The point of prison should be to lock up and keep an eye on criminals for a time, rehab and reintegrate them into society.
Removing all tethers to the outside world and treating them as sub humans and animals will just make them behave like such.
Case in point, pretty much all prison systems in the world, except the Nordics.
Honestly if society locked me in a cage for years and treated me as America treats its prisoners, and my work as a psychologist got me a front row seat, I would do everything I could to to work against said society when I got out. You can't treat others as enemies and expect anything but the same in kind.
The Nordic model of you made a mistake, you need to be punished, but what can we do during that punishment to make sure you won't need to resort to that again is the only rational and civilized path.
And the rational, barbaric, uncivilized path would be to just kill people if we refuse to make the effort to rehabilitate them.
We in the US choose option 3 because it's profitable. Irrationally provide no rehabilitation, make them MORE bitter and antisocial by forcing them live in inhuman conditions and to work for free as slaves (a dollar or less an hour is effectively free), then release them and see them in a month for more slave labor.
At this point, I have to assume our insane recitivism rate is by design.
Exactly, and don't even get me started on private prisons! Making people miserable and keeping them there is the whole point.
Holy strawman
Not exactly, just because they can’t vote now doesn’t mean they never could but yeah it kinda reinforces the status quo by eliminating competition.
I wholeheartedly agree with rehabilitation though
But I get a bit more extreme than most people like I see absolutely no benefit in locking people up, like at all. The only goal of incarceration should be rehabilitation anything less is a waste of resources and if there is no hope of rehabilitation well let’s just say that’s where me and the masses opinion differ.
It's MORE important for a prisoner to have a say in the laws keeping them imprisoned for those laws to be just.
Let's say a new fascist regime says everyone with green eyes goes to jail. That's a lot of people who think that law is unjust who are now just voiceless slaves, it's self-perpetuating. Now use this for civil rights, LGBT, on and on. Revoking a citizen's vote in addition to their freedom demonstrates how a perceived right gets devalued to an easily revokable privilege.
Its essential for any society that claims to value democracy, like the democratic republic we play pretend we are, to maximize enfranchisement, especially to those that fall subject to punishment of our laws.
But let's be honest. We don't even get a vote on the economy, just 2 bribed parties that differ on the social issue symptom management of said economy. We were never what we claimed and believed ourselves to be at any point. We're a gold plated, antisocial garbage oligarchy.
You didn't see any benefit in locking up people like Donald Trump and Jeffrey Dahmer?
I'll be the first the point out that many—perhaps most—felons aren't dangerous, but some of them clearly are.