The only ethically-hard problem is which jurisdiction their vote should count in, since they cannot demonstrate it by choosing where to live. Perhaps a choice between:

1. The location of the prison, if their main interest is the conditions of their detention rather than anything outside.

2. The location of their property or close family, because they're still paying property-taxes or school levies etc. and they will be returning there later.

Many people live in an area, but keep their voting registration in another. They are even able to vote without having to return to their registered polling place. Allowing inmates to vote could just as easily be handled the same way.

The bulk of felony-disenfranchisement laws have a clear causal connection to preventing newly-freed slaves from voting, as they were enacted alongside terrible laws ("Black codes") which did a lot of blatantly-evil stuff to force former slaves either into a shadow of their old servitude or into jail.

The problem is some people imaging voting is a prize you get for making the government happy, which can be clawed-back.

Instead, votes in a democracy are something we are owed due to the control that government exercises over our lives. If the government exerts extra control to lock you in a cage, that increases the moral necessity of a vote, rather than decreasing it.

By contrast, if you lump in people convicted of things like drug possession, that is enough people to change the outcome of some elections. And in general it's a strong heuristic that if huge numbers of people are committing a particular crime, it's a result of flaws in the law or society rather than flaws in huge numbers of different people.

So the only time disenfranchising felons matters to the outcome is when you get the line wrong, implying that it shouldn't be done because it shouldn't affect the outcome unless it's being done improperly.

It's weird because your argument doesn't seem to disagree with the notion that people should stay enfranchised, other than you saying specifically people should be disenfranchised for breaking a law. But you're now discussing lines so I guess you mean, literally any crime means no more voting.

A good democracy, and by that I mean useful for humans, isn't good by trying to be perfectly virtuous, it's good because it has recursive mechanisms to maintain its usefulness to humans. The primary mechanism is voting. For that reason I personally believe nothing should be allowed to remove the ability to use that primary mechanism, since the obvious outcome is a fascist is elected, and begins seeking means to strip the right to vote from his opponents, ensuring his perpetual rule. Modern example: I have a little antifa flag on my backpack, and therefore am now considered a terrorist in the USA, and can be arrested and have my right to vote stripped (other democratic mechanisms might prevent this, for now).

What crime would I have committed? Declaring an ideology a terrorist group is nonsensical but possible. Me suddenly being a terrorist crossed that line for you though.

So does speeding. So does operating your motor vehicle without checking your brake lights and turning indicators, every time. So does riding on a horse backwards in a specific town in Texas (don't forget local jurisdictions have their own laws, often insane!)

This is a personal decision, but would you say the same about someone with a small Nazi swastika on their backpack?

However, under liberal democracy I personally don't believe the wearing of a swastika should be a crime, though I don't mind if people wearing swastikas are rejected from every interaction they attempt to have, denied business everywhere. The simple banning of nazis memorabilia doesn't seem to be doing anything to stop the rise of nazism in Germany so it seems pointless overall. The Germans had their opportunity to actually apply this anti-nazi law when banning the AFD came up, and they failed to act, so it seems the only thing the law is good for is preventing people from playing Wolfenstein.

Under other forms of society I think the wearing of a swastika should result in the ejection of someone from society entirely.

You are in principle no different to the people you're complaining about. You've just got a smaller set of symbols than they do that you don't like.

Nazis should be ejected from society. Liberal democracy shouldn't have laws that allow arresting people for speech. Those aren't mutually exclusive concepts, that's just an anarchist explaining to you their ideology as well as how they apply their values under the current system.

Tell me, straight faced, that displaying a pair of antifa flags is as bad as displaying a swastika.

That way you can have pleasure of mistreating them and also prevent them from voting.

But once it's determined that the debt has been repaid and they're free to live outside and participate in society again, it seems hard to justify them not also participating in the democratic process.

I know people say this, but I think this framing likely generates anti-prison arguments because it basically doesn’t make any sense. How does being in a cage for X years repay society? It doesn’t. It does keep the harmful person away from society though, which is a very different and useful thing (in many cases, obviously imprisonment for some crimes is dumb).

How exactly is taking away an inmates vote "paying me back" for a crime in my community? "Society" isn't actually benefiting here.

Let's go down the list of justifications:

1. Is disenfranchisement rehabilitative justice? No, if anything it's the opposite, preparing them to fail when they get out, promoting ignorance and helplessness instead of engagement in the political process.

2. Is disenfranchisement punitive justice? Not usefully, because the worst criminals won't care anyway, instead it tends to hurt the people who deserve it the least, the people who would otherwise try to work through "the system."

3. Is disenfranchisement a deterrent? No, LOL. Nobody goes: "OK, I was going to commit the crime and risk being caught and shot or jailed for many years, buuuuut then I realized I wouldn't be able to vote, so I'm out."

What's left? Bad reasons, like helping politicians get away with abusive policies.

No, the principle underlying imprisonment is to protect others and rehabilitate the criminal.

It's literally unconscionable in any kid of democracy to me.

To be clear, I'm saying it's garbage, but it's garbage very much on purpose.

>> Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

The person occupying the Vice President's chair stated clearly [1] "Medicaid cuts in Senate tax bill 'immaterial' compared to ICE increases".

They aren't building all those for-profit prisons for nothing.

Beware.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/07/01/vanc...

But I think the laws in some U.S. states do actually allow felons to vote under certain circumstances.

Yes. Why shouldn't they?

1. Declaration of Independence versus Constitution. Not the same in terms of legal weight.

2. You're implicitly combining "representation" with "voting." The writers of the Declaration of Independence believed (even if we dislike it today) that those are separate. You can tell because all their wives and daughters were still prohibited from voting for generations.

3. If what you're suggesting applied, then wouldn't that mean everybody who hasn't registered to vote, or noncitizens and those under 18--are all exempt from sales tax and income tax?

It's worse than that. It's the erasure of a check against bad laws. If you pass bad laws that destroy communities by bringing about mass incarceration, the obvious thing to happen next is that you lose the votes of all the people whose lives you've destroyed. Except that you took their votes away too.

[0] https://www.sentencingproject.org/fact-sheet/florida-bans-vo...

[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voti...

I guess state laws vary a lot, but are you sure that’s legal? You probably are required to have your address updated, even if moving within the same precinct. If they then allow you a choice of locations, sounds fine, but your wording sounded like maybe you don’t tell them you moved, which is probably not legal.

It's the racism. It's why the 13th amendment allows slavery for criminals and why Black people are disproportionately targeted and imprisoned.

If we're on the democratic reforms train, then this is all a silly discussion we're forced to have because the US doesn't have proportional representation.

https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/2023-03/20...

Places with a greater population tend to get more representatives in a state or federal legislature, all else being equal.

This makes sense for minors (part of voter-households) and noncitizen adults (either another part of voter-households or with freedom of travel) but it becomes a perverse-incentive when we start talking about people forced to be in a specific place by a government that put them there and won't let them leave.

> Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons

"Free persons" in this case meant those not enslaved for life, so it includes incarcerated people. Representation apportionment also includes illegal immigrants under this clause.

Ensuring they can communicate with their families at no charge would be a huge plus as well.

https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid%3A42e604d8-31d0-4067-a08c-...

Agree, but do we have experiments trying Nordic models in America to see what aspects of their model work here (and which may not)?

Getting policy right under adversarial conditions is really hard - even harder than the already hard problem of identifying and testing good policy.

https://www.science.org/content/article/how-will-little-scan...

Sounds like Oregon started but hasn't gotten very far:

https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/08/425946/how-norway-helping-...

Just like Swedish-American homelessness rates are comparable to homelessness rates in Sweden, etc.

...are they? (Serious question.)

(Note: "There was no significant difference in rates of lifetime adult homelessness between foreign-born adults and native-born adults (1.0% vs 1.7%). Foreign-born participants were less likely to have various mental and substance-use disorders, less likely to receive welfare, and less likely to have any lifetime incarceration. The number of years foreign-born adults lived in the United States was significantly associated with risk for homelessness" [1])

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00333...

There's lots of evidence that maintaining connection to family, and providing skills training reduces recidivism. You should be asking for studies proving that what we're currently doing is effective or humane.

As in, a certain % of the population is, very unfortunately and not of their own volition, born with innate antisocial traits. They just happened to roll an 1 at birth and are stuck with it for life. Assuming humans are not a blank slate, many said humans will not be re-trainable to be pro-social. And they will cause mayhem and misery to those around them unless isolated, humanely and with compassion, from the rest of society. Given a large enough of a denominator, that’s potentially millions of people.

And fair point around social ties being important here, I wonder what percentage of imprisonment that would prevent.

In short: humans are not inherently good 'uns or bad 'uns. The social interventions made by friends, families, community, state-run programs, have a discernable effect on reoffending rates.

I think it’s logical that you’re both right, with the disagreement being in the ratio. If you honestly think all humans are born equal, I suggest visiting a mental ward, or more relevant here, watching some interviews/analysis of mass murderers. There’s a well accepted, by the medical field, by objective metrics, spectrum of self control, awareness, autonomy, and intelligence, expressed in humans. We’re not all the same. You typing here suggests you’re on the relatively extreme end of the “genetic luck” spectrum.

I don't. But in addition to genetics, babies pop out of rich and poor vaginas. Socioeconomic status is a much stronger indicator for being incarcerated than genetics (not counting "male vs female"). There is also the theory that the children of prisoners grow up without fathers and are more likely to go to prison, thus perpetuating the cycle. Children that lose both parents (to imprisonment, drug addiction, abandonment) and enter foster care or become wards of the state have terrible life outcomes. Not genetic, but familial due to disrupted social support networks.

I also think that if, for example, you get addicted to heroin, and you don't have a good support network, that will be your only life until you're dead. But if you do have a good support network, you have an better chance of getting clean and staying clean.

But they’re also correct. There will be some subset of the population that will be, and remain, harmful to society. This isn’t even a purely human concept, and can be found in all species with collective/social behavior.

Most likely it's a combination of genetics, cultural expectations, social support networks, and a litany of other elements that all come together to affect the ultimate outcome. Which aligns with your thesis around one's support network making a huge difference. But it's just important to point out that poverty by itself is not causal of crime, it simply makes it more likely given many other factors such as culture and community. It's mildly predictive, but up to a point.

Funnily enough, as a side-note, the stats show that most white-collar crime is committed by well-educated and affluent white men in their forties or older, causing a lot more financial harm than your everyday street crime added up.

Assuming the certain % is something meaningful and not like 1% then:

Yes, given that America and the world has run the largest ever social experiment, America imprisoning a higher percentage of their population than any other country and most other countries continuing to thrive with lower crime numbers than America (in cases where countries do not thrive obvious external and environmental factors are seen) it follows that America, a nation of immigrants with higher heterogeneity of the population than other nations of the Earth, does not have a population with a greater percentage of the population genetically predisposed to anti-sociability.

America has a population where 1 in 3 adults has a criminal record. If criminality was in any significant way genetically hard-wired in Americans it seems difficult to believe the country would have lasted as long as it has, although I admit my argument here may be slightly weak given the current state of things, but I think one can argue that is not the fault of the anti-social population.

If this were true, sociability wouldn't be so incredibly overwhelmingly correlated with trauma, and to the extent that trauma & poverty are related, poverty. This is a full and utter complete fact, it is foundational knowledge to social science, psychology and psychiatry.

People. Are. Not. Born. Bad. They're born to traumatized parents raised in a society that squeezes them for all they're worth.

> many said humans will not be re-trainable to be pro-social

The vast, vast majority of people absolutely could be, but they will never receive the resources (time, attention) to be better. It is not that we don't know how to help people, its that its /expensive/ and we /would rather punish them than help them/.

Here in Brazil criminals are extremely dehumanized as well and used as electoral fodder. Leave them to rot in amounts proportional to the anger of the population against criminality as it rises again in the country, or at least the perception of it.

They are used to quickly let this social pressure out without actually solving anything and without making the population safer.

It would be really nice if remote work could serve as a viable vector for rehabilitation. Everyone involved would benefit from it, we just have to beware of the wrong kinds of incentives, so that people don't get thrown in jail only to serve as cheap remote labor later.

I only bring this up because it seems like the mental model most people have is that 50--90% of prisons are private - mainly because it gets discussed so much. But the problems with prisons by-and-large involve government administration, not for-profit companies running the amok (despite that also happening in a much smaller number of cases).

Yep. Everyone's heard about private prisons and their pet judges, but few know anything about Bob Barker or VitaPro. Their are deep and very murky waters here.

Are a red herring to distract from the real issue. The industrialist complex around prisons that do in fact profit from prisons. Like all gov contracts are also highly inefficient by design.

But yes, the ones really profiting are those making deals to service the prison. Those who bring food, or repair the infrastructure, or custodial duties. A lot of seemingly unrelated industries have every reason to lobby in the background to focus on "hard on crime".

[1] https://truthout.org/articles/immigration-detention-has-beco...

  However, currently only 8.5% of people who are incarcerated are held in private facilities.

  Despite the significant amount of economic and political power held by private prison corporations, it is imperative to understand that private prisons are not the only force at work in the Prison Industrial Complex.

  Exclusive focus on private prison corporations as the lynchpin of the PIC ignores and overlooks the variety of other players and systems at work.

  For example, there are thousands of companies and a wide range of contracts in both private and public prisons: it is a whole network of parties with vested interests.

  In Are Prisons Obsolete, Angela Davis explains that,
    “…even if private prison com­panies were prohibited – an unlikely prospect, indeed-the prison industrial complex and its many strategies for profit would remain relatively intact.
     Private prisons are direct sources of profit for the companies that run them, but pub­lic prisons have become so thoroughly saturated with the profit-producing products and services of private corpora­tions that the distinction is not as meaningful as one might suspect”
    (Davis, 2003, 99-100).

It's the same as paying someone to dig a hole, then paying someone to fill it back up. The money might as well have disappeared, as there's nothing to show for it (for the taxpayers that is - the hole digger is happy to have been paid)

> cost the government $65k to imprison someone, but that money isn’t disappearing

which is wrong, because it _is_ disappearing.

Your argument is unrelated - it sure would be good if people didnt commit crimes for which incarceration is required, but it doesn't mean the cost has benefits. It simply has to be done; i would liken it to getting sick, and the healthcare costing money. That money, as far as you are concerned, disappeared, as it brought you no lasting benefit, even tho you must spend it.

https://legaljournal.princeton.edu/the-economic-impact-of-pr...

~ https://abcnews.go.com/US/top-private-prison-companies-profi...

Prison Contracts: Profits & Politics

  Two corporations, GEO Group, Inc. and CoreCivic, Inc. (CCA), manage over half of the private prison contracts in the US.

  These contracts are extremely lucrative; in the 2017 fiscal year, GEO Group and CoreCivic earned a combined revenue of more than 4 billion dollars.

  Corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic are invested in mass incarceration because incarceration is profitable for them.

  Such corporations ensure that correctional facilities are in demand through a variety of techniques, including minimum occupancy clauses and political lobbying efforts.

private prisons make money for their corporations. Look up Wackenhut.

This is a starry-eyed, naive perspective. Truth is, criminals disproportionately are vile people, largely past any hope.

Anyone driving more than 30m/h over the speed limit is guilty of reckless driving. That's a criminal.

Anyone using controlled substances (including cannabis) is a criminal.

Anyone driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol is a criminal.

Anyone watching their kids while drunk/high -- a criminal.

And dozens of other things folks do every single day. Makes them criminals.

In fact, GP is almost certainly a criminal. Throw them in prison!

Criminals have to want to stop doing crime before they can be rehabilitated.

This is literally what rehabiliation entails. Convincing criminals that they have better options than crime.

It doesn't work for everyone. There are absolutely bad people who will just violate social contracts, or who can't control their rage turning into violence. Those people need to be incapacitated. But for the vast majority of criminals, particularly non-violent criminals, crime is an economic cost-benefit exercise.

Whenever a read a story about someone who's been to prison and then ends up a solid, productive member of society, I can't help but think: "This person must have extraordinary grit and determination!" Because when a criminal gets out of prison, the entire system and the entire society is set up to try to oppose his rehabilitation and get him back into prison. Overcoming this active hostility must take a remarkable person.

This is precisely the story of Les Misérables - that remarkable person being Jean Valjean.

I think some people just haven't been exposed to the benefits of taking a path to life that doesn't involve crime. Some people also need to be convinced that there are viable alternatives to crime. And as someone else said, society needs to give them the chance to redeem themselves and pursue those alternate paths.

I don’t think many people in the US care about rehab. They seem viscerally invested in the concept of a prison as a place to store/segregate violent people, but have no interest in either helping those people learn to live safely in society or to have any advantages that the poorest non-prisoner gets.

Before we can jump straight to pointing to successful prison labor programs, I think we need to figure out how to message to those voters that it matters how we treat prisoners.

I think they exist quite widely among the population. Old, white republicans want more people in jail. Young, non-white democrats think we jail too many people.

50% of the country thinks we jail too many

s) https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/45975-what-americ...

Compare to Australia, where the employer doesn't see detail. They file the background check, but only get a "yes" or "no", based on that specific job and past offenses (if any).

"He figured Thorpe might have trouble clearing the company's background check and he says he prepared himself for that. But since it only searches back seven years and since Thorpe has been in prison for more than a decade, "He is actually our cleanest background check," Costa says."

"He doesn't have a parking ticket." What does a parking ticket, let alone a criminal conviction have to do with programming?

Let's just go ahead and get to the exploitation, the corporate scum offered him minimum wage and are taking advantage of his situation.

1. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prison-and-crime-much-more-...