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 ?
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.
Always fun to remember that the US threw off the shackles of oppression due to a 3% tax rate.
I’ve never understood this. What’re they gonna do? Vote to make crimes legal?
the point was to reform them into civic minded individuals ?
That was never the point.
When you also can escalate certain crimes (like cannabis) to target portions of the population it gets pretty dystopian already.
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.
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…
What is the CCCP? You mean Communist Party of China?
Oops, too many Cs haha! Yess, the CCP /CPC
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.
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?
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.
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.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.
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.
I do feel like that gives an incentive to get people of the opposite party into prison to influence the election.
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?
The post is not about prisoners.
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It us not just petty or counterproductive. It is violating the basic principle of democracy itself.
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.
Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act has been terrible, directly subsidising industry to move to the US, right when Europe is struggling
but, isn’t that good for Americans? And isn’t Biden the President of America?
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.
The only problem there is that the count also determines how federal money is distributed. Undocumented/illegal immigrants still use interstates and water mains and disaster money and national parks and federal buildings. Unless we want funding cut, we still have to count them.
*Edit: I’m embarrassed that I got all that written before 3/5 hit me. “The only problem” 😬
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.
I was more referring to green card holders, but that’s exactly my point. By excluding people based on whether they can vote or not, you get inaccurate results and make the whole process pointless.
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.
