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.

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.

When you also can escalate certain crimes (like cannabis) to target portions of the population it gets pretty dystopian already.

the point was to reform them into civic minded individuals ?

That was never the point.

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.

There are already enough potential voters who have been imprisoned, not the future, such that they could tip the balance. If you’re not sure if this is case, just look at how hard the GOP acts to block reinstatement of voting rights for ex felons.

Rehabilitation has never been the goal. The goal is free labor pool and punishment. The cruelty is the point.

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.

Giving hoe little one vote matters…

Stop using this dumb mindset. Also there is more than 1 felon.

The united states already imprisons so many people, and unevenly at that.

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.

Most people would rather vilify than forgive.

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.

1. 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?

2. 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?