New thread, maybe m I’m curious about this.
They may not be part of your community, but they are absolutely part of a community. Besides, if you have to be ‘part of the community’ to vote, that would exclude an awful lot of people that don’t leave their houses. Should people that are housebound due to a handicap not get to vote? What about introverts or people with depression that don’t want to interact with others. They just want to sit in their house and watch TV? What about those that spend most of their time in a different county or state (work/dating etc).
I think what you’re saying is that they’re not part of YOUR community and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
Inmates work and get paid. The get paid practically nothing, but they still get paid. The jobs they’re doing would otherwise be filled by regular employees, being paid by the government, making at least minimum wage. The government is already saving the difference between what they’d pay a civilian and what they pay an inmate, let’s call it at least $15,000 per year, per job filled by an inmate. Also, inmates do pay taxes on what they make. Most states also charge inmates to stay in jail. Usually $20+ per day. Releasing someone from jail, handing them a bill for $20,000 and then taking them to court when they don’t pay up is a great way to keep them in the system, but that’s another story.
You mean like utilities or the court system or health care (both within the prison and at a hospital) or living in a jail (assuming it’s not privately run) or the mail or the local inspectors (the jail is going to get an annual health/building/electrical/plumbing inspection just like any other place in the jurisdiction) and I’m sure there’s more.
No, they may not drive on public roadways or go to the public park, but they’re most certainly using public resources.
So, to recap, they are part of the local community, even if you don’t interact with them. They do pay taxes, even if they don’t make as much as you and they do use public services, but maybe they use them differently than you.
Why shouldn’t they get a say in any of these things?
As long as the prison population isn’t so large that they can swing the vote towards something like ‘all prisoners should be released’ or ‘if you’re in jail you get a million dollars’, is it really such a problem that they’d want to elect officials or vote for things that will make their life a bit less shitty. If someone got arrested for selling some weed or being a prostitute or committing a white collar crime, should they not get be able to elect officials or vote to get laws change that will get them better food or make it easier for them to find work after they get out?
I used to feel the same way you did. We all have a social contract with everyone else. You follow abide by the laws and you get to enjoy the freedoms given to you by the constitution. If you break the law, all bets are off. I just don’t feel that way any more. At least not in every single situation. Sure, maybe a convicted serial killer doesn’t get to make decisions about their living conditions, but the person that got picked up for smoking meth at 2am in an alley, not hurting anyone but themselves. They should still retain some of their rights.
And what’s the practical difficulty with bringing a few poll workers in and running a voting booth in the jail?
Why do you think this would be a real logistical headache? Prisoners are allowed to send and receive mail. That’s all it involves. I did it every year in college. It’s not about logistics, it’s just about voting eligibility.
It doesn’t have to be that way. It’s not in the Constitution. It’s a conscious choice that a minority of states have made regarding felons.
I would counter and say that many people in jail are political prisoners, people who are only there because of unjust or discriminatory laws that make it difficult to exist without committing an offense. People who are in jail are arguably more critically affected by the legal system than anyone and should have an equal voice in governing it.
A core principal of modern democracy is that of the social contract - that individuals sacrifice some freedoms in exchange for the benefits of living in a governed society.
Criminals have broken the social contract and, by doing so, have declared that they do not consent to be governed. A person who makes that declaration does not necessarily have a right to vote because they have divorced themselves from society.
Having said that, I for the most part agree with you. I’m good with violent felons losing their right to vote, but otherwise I say go nuts.
By and large, the people who are disenfranchised due to being in prison are the same demographics who are being disenfranchised when they aren’t in prison. It’s just another side of a really shitty coin.
Could one argue that even though, by breaking the law they’ve declared they do not consent to being governed, by being in jail they’re now being involuntarily governed?
Another thought on this, in addition to what I stated earlier. By suggesting that those that don’t pay taxes shouldn’t be able to vote, that would exclude anyone that doesn’t work (or own property). So an 18 year old kid with no job can’t vote. A person that screwed up at work and got fired can’t vote. All those on welfare can’t vote. People with disabilities that keep them from working can’t vote. The millions upon millions of people out of work right now due to the pandemic can’t vote.
The scary thing is that disenfranchises a lot more of the lower class than the upper class. And all those with no income are the ones most reliant on our elected leaders. Someone making a million+ dollars a year voting to have their income tax reduced by a half a percent won’t be effected nearly as much as someone making a few thousand dollars a year trying to get their welfare to go up by a hundred dollars a month.
At some point the richest people out there have little use for that extra money while the poorest can’t afford food or housing.
I don’t see why not. Note that I’m not (for the most part) arguing in favor of prisoner disenfranchisement. I’m just pointing out it’s not antithetical to the Enlightenment concepts that birthed our system of government.
Breaking the law is not automatically a declaration of being ungovernable. Unless you can provide a signed declaration to that effect, or unless you can produce text of the “social contract”, you are just dressing up an opinion with vocabulary words.
Some laws are unjust. Some parts of the criminal justice system are unjust. Everyone we put into that system should have a vote as to how that system is constituted and administered.
My son works in a Florida prison. His coworkers are overwhelmingly against the idea of prisoners voting.
.
Why?
I don’t know. I was in Florida for my son’s wedding last year. Many of the guests were his coworkers. I was asking questions about working in a prison and at some point I asked about voting. The 20 or so people were unanimously against changing the previous status quo (no voting while in prison, no voting ever after a felony). The state had just voted to give felons (except murder/rape) back their right after they served their sentence and they all thought that was BS.
It would be interesting to see candidates have to campaign on the basis of winning prisoner’s votes. Never seen that before. (But that would only happen if prison inmates are a large bloc of a town’s population, like 20% or more)
I mentioned that upthread. I don’t know the logistics of how it would work, but if inmates can vote, some changes would likely have to be implemented to make sure the inmates couldn’t, by themselves, swing an election. If you have a city that has 20,000 inmates and 7000 civilians, the inmates could easily get whoever they want elected if they voted together.
On the one hand, that doesn’t seem fair. On the other hand limiting jail populations or gerrymandering within a prison system to reduce how effective their individual votes are doesn’t seem fair either.
So should some changes be made so a college student population can’t swing an election?
“No voting ever after a felony” translates to “never being able to exert influence over the system that exerted influence over them.” The people who know the system best are the inmates and ex-inmates, and we wouldn’t want them to be able to break up the prison industrial complex. [/s]
Seriously, the guards have a political position: they deserve more money because they work with so many dangerous inmates. Having more inmates and more dangerous inmates improves their negotiating position, so many prison policies seem based on keeping as many inmates in prison as long as possible, making them angrier while in prison, and making it so they are more likely to return. That’s good for the guards, but bad for society as a whole.
Yeah, you might have candidates running for office on the platform of improving prison conditions (nothing wrong with that, by the way) but doing so primarily based on winning inmate votes. Prisons are a rat hole right now, so no problem with making them humane and decent, but…eventually it might go further than that, prisons might become more and more luxurious.
The prison population might be enough to swing a local election (say to city council or the board of selectmen) but that wouldn’t have any effect on a prison that’s run by the state as a whole.
I’m fine with that as well. I have no problem with better conditions in jail. Granted, the people are in jail, so there’s that, but I still want them to come out the other end a better person, not angry, vengeful and unemployable.
My concern is what happens when they try (or succeed) to elect someone that’s goes beyond improving conditions. Someone that, for example, wants to abolish the prison system or pay inmates for being in jail or give them a free car when they get out or promise to pardon everyone if they’re elected.
Granted, those things probably can’t be done, it’s just something that popped into my head.
But there’s no such thing as a “state ballot.” When I get a ballot, I get to vote for every public body or office that covers my home (and is up for election that day), from president and Congress, to governor and state legislature, to county board and sheriff, to village board, to school board.
A college student still lives in the college town for (at least part of) four years and while there is affected by the various levels of government there. A person with no children is still affected by the decisions made by their local school board. Ditto a person who never leaves the house, or who has a home in a particular town but spends most of their time elsewhere (as Joey_P mentions), still being affected by local government decisions, if nothing else local taxes.
A prisoner is clearly affected by decisions made by the federal and state governments, and certainly a reasonable argument can be made for prisoners voting in federal and state elections on that basis. But an inmate in a prison in Dinkytown, Farmer County, is not affected in the least by the decisions of the Dinkytown council or the Farmer County board. He will never pay a penny of Dinkytown or Farmer County taxes, unlike the homebound Dinkytown resident or the guy who owns a house in Dinkytown and lists it as his residence but travels 300 days a year. IMHO (and again to Joey_P’s point) a prisoner is still a member of the national and state communities, but not the local communities where his/her prison happens to be.
I agree prisoners are being involuntarily governed. The life of a prisoner is heavily regulated and monitored by representatives of the government. Probably more so than any other group of people I can think of.