Texas woman sentenced to 5 years in prison for voting while on probation
11 replies, posted
https://www.texastribune.org/2018/03/30/texas-woman-sentenced-5-years-prison-voting-while-probation/?utm_campaign=trib-social&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_content=1522422092
daily reminder that prisoners and felons should be able to vote, especially because they're often very adversely affected by shit policies e.g. drug war.
holy shit wtf
Because prisoners would vote against judges that ruled on them, and against policies affecting prisoners.
Yep, that makes total sense.
Because we gotta be TOUGH ON CRIME!
It kinda makes sense to not have them vote on local elections, but being unable to vote on the state or federal level is bullshit.
But then the politicians that make these awful laws that punish these people might get voted out of their 6 digit incomes!
I assume you're talking about how we vote for judges n shit.
And perhaps you're right at the moment, but you'd probably want to just stop making judges a directly elected position in the first place.
also the medical examiner
What makes it even worse is that she was actually released on supervision from prison only a short while earlier, and it wasn’t like it was that awful of a crime; only a bit of small-time tax fraud. Now she has to face the reality of possibly going back.
Just imagine what America would be like if Americans love and care for democracy as much as they love and care for their guns.
Well the both rights have an entire political party hellbent on limiting access as much as possible.
I wonder if suddenly giving the United States' 2.2 million strong prison population the right to vote would radically skew the way elections go, and I wonder which side it would skew to.
You could probably very easily get a demographic census on the entire prison population.
abrogating anyone's right to vote at any level is dumb bullshit whether they're in prison or out on the streets.
The present logic behind disenfranchising people who have committed crimes is so ridiculous. It's like there's this fear that a bunch of criminals will group together and somehow elect a "bad guy" into office. There is a 0% chance of that ever happening. If your stated goal for incarceration is a combination of punishment and rehabilitation, you should be making it easier for people to politically operate, not harder. This gets them invested in society at large and encourages civic engagement.
Disenfranchising people on this basis comes from old school jim crow bullshit and should be banned at the national level.
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