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.
Can we be totally honest here and just state what the fear is?
If slaves could vote they’d vote for freedom.
There’s a hole the size of a railroad junction in the 13nd amendment.
There’s a hole the size of a railroad junction in the 13nd amendment.
It’s less of a loophole and more of a loop-archway… with bright neon signs to advertise it.
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.
The monsters aren’t the ones being created, the monsters are the ones creating those circumstances to begin with.
I know you didn’t mean anything by it, but that shift in focus is really important to point out, because those same people rely on you and me to see the poor people who’s lives they destroyed as the problem, instead of whose who really are.
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None of that changes the fact that it is the system that creates that kind of behaviour by encouraging and rewarding selfishness, greed, hate, and doing whatever it takes to “succeed”.
I’m not denying that there are horrible people out there (I’ve been victim to a few personally), or that they shouldn’t be held responsible for individual actions if they harm others (they should), but in almost all cases you can’t blame them for turning out that way (again, not excusing any harm they go on to cause to others) when you look at the circumstances they need to exist in. Circumstances designed by a handful of people reaping unfathomable benefits.
So I’d much sooner point my finger at those who are actually to blame, instead of at those who are the fucked up products of their system, because one of those not only creates infinitely more damage than the other, but also it’s only that same group that have the power to do anything to stop it.
Begs the question of if the Stanford prison experiment ever really ended.
This. The whole thing is 100% by design, any other reasoning is a distraction created, again by design, to get us to look the other way.
Don’t.
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.
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.
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?
See, e.g., the war on “drugs”
The GOP has been working towards making the US a dictatorship since the 60s. We passed the civil rights act and the right was so appalled that they had to treat people of color like, well, people, that they’ve been coming up with new ways to ensure progress never happens again ever since.
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
It’s the nature of democracy that one vote equals 1/N of the population. That is not flaw with the individual. It just means that for his vote to actually means something, it has to be part of a social memetic arrangements and not cast in the abstract.
Of course with first past the post, the electoral colege, gerrymandering all conspiring to further devalue and skew the value of one vote, democratic voting becomes increasingly meaningless. This is not a flaw of the individual but of the system itself being corrupt.
And then we have yet another layer of disenfranchisement, which is republicanism, in which voters do not directly vote for their interest but vote for an agent which will have a long term in which to “interpret” whatever the electorate really meant by voting for him. He will do so in a space where the constantly fluctuating social memetic arrangements that got him elected are not really under his control and are only loosely, and shortly affected by his action.
This is because the control of the fluctuating social memetic arrangement is in the hand of the actual social elite, the people who own or have seized the megaphone of power and who grossly compete and collude. Largely to maintain the arrangement, usually in an uneasy peace with their immediate competitors. These people are not just politicials but media moguls, celebrities and other billionaires.
Any solution to this problem must look to the system as a whole and create incentives to the individual that will enable him to at least have his 1/N power over the state of things. Free of the influence of the actual social elite who fill his heads with ideas that benefit them rather than the individual. And in a way where individual can act collectively for their interests.
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The US is nuts. You can vote from prison in Canada
Also the same in Australia. In fact, it’s required by law for them to vote (as it is for all eligible voters)
But if that were really true why ever release them at all? Why not go the full China approach with capital punishment and organ donation?
I think it’s just a legacy from older laws, especially against gangs in smaller communities, etc.
What could go wrong with giving a democratic government the power to strip voting rights from those people they deem unsuitable to vote on how they are governed? /s
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.
It’s not strange at all when you consider your own phrasing: calls itself a democracy.
Plenty of places do that. Doesn’t make it so.
Doesn’t the US also have the largest population of prisoners in the entire world too?
Currently China, per capita El Salvador. US scores second most population wise (3rd most populous country, so it’s not that unreasonable?) and 5th per capita (No excuse).
The US appears to have been slowly going down a little bit, some times when it feels like it, more so if you’re white, with a big drop during Covid.
Interesting. I can imagine China’s high rate of incarceration is due to the CCCP and El Salvador is due to the cartels. Wonder how many of those in prison in the US are there for pretty drug crimes though…
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.
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.
Small quibble, but the census came up with about 331 million people, and there are almost 8 billion people on the planet. Clearly, some are excluded from the census.
Hardy har.
Within my facetious response is a kernel of truth: some of those people within US borders are foreign tourists. Surely, a French high school class touring Washington DC shouldn’t be counted on the census.
When someone overstays their visa, at what point do they stop being “foreign persons” and start being “undocumented Americans”? At what point is it reasonable to start counting them as our own?
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.
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.
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.
the point was to reform them into civic minded individuals ?
That was never the point.
The US criminal justice system has never been for rehabilitation. No sane person thinks jail makes someone less likely to commit crimes.
It worked out for my brother and I’ve always been surprised by that.
That’s good to hear. I hope he’s doing well.
But that’s what’s often missed regarding statistics. It’s true for a large group of people but can’t say anything about the individual.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I believe recidivism is a real problem and that my brother got on the straight and narrow perhaps just as much inspite of his 4 years in prison as because of.
Oh yes, I got that you knew that. I was speaking about the others, sorry that I didn’t make that clear enough.
