(Source.) It's interesting that -- while the south has disproportionately harsh policies -- the overall picture is fairly patchy and random. For the record, while I don't believe in disenfranchising prisoners, I could live with the no-inmates, or the no-inmates-or-parolees, policy. Disenfranchising people on probation seems like a bit much.
4 comments:
It's all too much. Disenfranchising ex-cons is obviously the worst, but all of these policies do more harm than good. They distort the democratic process, excrete convicts from the body politic, and don't serve any of the classic purposes of punishment -- aside from retribution, which is not sufficient and can be satisfied in better ways. In other words, I know you're against all of this, but you should be strongly against all of it.
Maybe a case can be made from disenfranchising prisoners who will definitely be in for life.
Yes. I just wanted to distinguish between policies I consider unduly harsh and those I consider intolerable. I'm very far to the left of center on crime, so this is a necessary distinction. Prisoners aren't members of civic society while they're in prison; it makes sense, abstractly, to strip them of the vote, but in practice the prison population is large and unrepresentative, and the resulting social distortion is an unacceptable cost to my mind. Ex-cons and probationers (and maybe parolees, I'm sort of spewing here) are members of society and should have the vote, even on symbolic grounds.
Post a Comment