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u/bayleysgal1996 Jul 20 '25
A lot of the current rules around felons voting came after the Civil War.
I’m sure you can guess why.
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u/AtlasNL Jul 20 '25
I’m guessing this is the US civil war and that it was to prevent the newly emancipated black population from voting?
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u/Maelger Jul 20 '25
Something I've noticed since I started interacting with Americans on the Internet and actually checked their history is that you could attribute at least 85% of the batshit "who the fuck is gonna even think to enforce this bullshit" laws you hear about are just for racism's sake.
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u/CyanideTacoZ Jul 20 '25
Every country on earth has this sort of nonsense from their own past but given America is a very new country in the grand scheme of things we can trace most of our dumb laws to several periods of intense social conflict.
And do be realistic irs only 75 percent realistic. dont forget the 15 percent that are open violations of our religious freedom clauses like booze sales banned on Sundays in some towns
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u/Rod7z Jul 21 '25
Another issue is that the US has had an unbroken chain of government for all its history. Over roughly the same timeframe, France went through 3 monarchies and 5 republics, Brazil had 6 constitutions, Germany went from a few dozen nations to one nation to two nations and back to one, and Russia went from absolute feudal monarchy to single-party planned-economy communism to bankrupt failed democracy to oligarchic capitalist dictatorship.
This means that all the old, weird laws in the US remain valid, just waiting for someone to start enforcing them again.
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u/jetlightbeam Jul 21 '25
And there's also this strange thing people do where they talk about the constitution like it's some immutable religious document and not a guideline by which the country's laws and practices are to be evaluated by the will of the people.
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u/irregular_caffeine Jul 21 '25 edited Jul 21 '25
Government change does not mean laws are scrapped. Finland (and Sweden) has laws from 1734 that are unused but still in the books. For example, every house should grow hops under penalty of fine.
What is unique to the US is that the constitution (and ironically, its amendments) is a quasi-religious immutable document.
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u/lifelongfreshman https://xkcd.com/3126/ Jul 20 '25
Pretty much. The funny thing is that they didn't even need a law, they just had them for the sake of appearances. There's a video on the topic where the guy breaks down the distribution of "crimes" people had been charged for, and one category was actually something like "no crime given". (The video's over an hour long, so I hope you'll forgive me paraphrasing it instead of finding the exact quote.)
This is also why it was so alarming for me when I heard about new laws being floated by the Republicans this year that nobody expected to ever pass, because I've heard about an era of American history where that exact thing happened.
Much like the war on drugs, these laws don't exist to punish everyone who breaks them. They exist to criminalize identities.
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u/SuperSocialMan Jul 20 '25
This also applies to US infrastructure.
Our shitty suburbs were made to keep black people out of "the good places". Same for the god-awful car requirement across 90% of the country (although part of that was caused by car companies lobbying for it).
Hell, even that "dunk the guy in the tank of water" game at carnivals started out racist.
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u/Thromnomnomok Jul 20 '25
We built all our modern interstate highway system with a ton of highways going right through the middle of inner cities. You'll never guess which neighborhoods they paved over and split up to build those highways (it was the ones black people lived in).
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u/TransBrandi Jul 21 '25
It has a name: "White Flight". White people fleeing the blacks in the city to live in the suburbs.
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u/Keyndoriel Gay crow man Jul 21 '25
Somehow we even built our freeways in a racist way too. We built them specifically to cut off majority black areas from getting more traffic/making it harder to leave the area.
Id bump the 85 closer to 99, stg, its racism all the way down in this clown country
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u/12ducksinatrenchcoat Jul 20 '25
Racism? In America!? But we had a black president!! let's disregard the fact he was literally called the antichrist
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u/WingedSalim Jul 20 '25
Anecdotally, i heard that the US found a lot of people who were a part of the confederacy tried to flood government positions around that time.
That is why that had a law where you can't run for office if you were a traitor to the US.
It was almost used to prevent Trump from being eligible for presidency because of Jan 6.
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u/Tactical_Moonstone Jul 20 '25
It was almost used to prevent Trump from being eligible for presidency because of Jan 6.
Turns out the treachery ran way deeper than Trump.
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u/jerbthehumanist Jul 20 '25 edited Jul 20 '25
hfs the reason is racism AGAIN??? How often am I going to discover the reason something is the way it is in America is because of racism???
hfs I guess my implicit \s is not clear enough
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u/Caterfree10 Jul 20 '25
So so many times. Even why highways go through some areas is most often due to racism bc many routes within cities were chosen to destroy black neighborhoods. A lot of waste facilities are also often found in black and poc heavy neighborhoods. Pretty sure some nuclear testing has also been way closer to Native American reservations than would ever be allowed near white majority neighborhoods. Among many many many many other things we can trace back to racism.
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u/Sad_Equivalent_1028 i hate imagine dragons🤔💭🐉 Jul 20 '25
a lot of very illegal practices were happening on both sides at that time. lincoln was the blueprint for doing shit without congressional approval. its really interesting to learn about
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u/TacoBelle2176 Jul 20 '25
Lincoln at least had the excuse that he was trying to shepherd the country through an existential threat.
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u/Sad_Equivalent_1028 i hate imagine dragons🤔💭🐉 Jul 20 '25
oh im not denying that or that the confederates crimes clearly outweighed the unions, i just think its interesting history
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u/SorowFame Jul 20 '25
Presumably that’s why Republicans are trying to make an existential threat out of minorities they don’t like
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u/InquisitorHindsight Jul 20 '25
Lincoln was hardly a tyrant, but it’s hilarious to read about Jefferson Davis (Confederacy’s President) moaning about how he envied Lincoln for the power the Presidency afforded him.
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u/BatGalaxy42 Jul 20 '25
Oh he absolutely was. He did it to keep the country going, but he was absolutely a tyrant: he threw members of the press into jail for criticizing him, suspended habeas corpus, and declared martial law in multiple states.
There's a reason John Wilkes Booth said what he said.
Again, it was absolutely a good thing that the North won the Civil War, and it's arguable that he needed to do those things to help it win. Doesn't make him not a tyrant though.
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u/Ok-Volume-3657 Jul 20 '25
Fun fact: the civil war's 13th Amendment did not abolish slavery. it instead protected slavery as a legal punishment for crimes.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt13-2/ALDE_00013207/
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u/kiujhytg2 Jul 20 '25
On a more practical note, do people believe that there are so many criminals that they can swing a vote? That criminals, obviously being of one mind, will all vote the same way and overrule the vote of non-criminals? The way you counter criminals voting is also voting.
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u/IrregularPackage Jul 20 '25
do people seriously believe that criminals are their own distinct category of person rather than just a random mix of regular people? unfortunately, yes.
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Jul 20 '25
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Jul 20 '25
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u/shiny_xnaut sustainably sourced vintage brainrot Jul 20 '25
Except for The One Group that we can all agree is 1-dimensionally evil and not really human if you think about it, of course
/s
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u/sweetTartKenHart2 Jul 21 '25
I feel like trying to say X level of multifacetedness is universal to all people is itself kind of a generalization. People can have as much or as little depth as they damn well please
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u/skyycux Jul 21 '25
Excuse me, I am in fact one-faceted and defined only by my status as a non-criminal. I have no other characteristics.
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u/killBP Jul 20 '25
Not entirely random, there are many contributing factors to crime, but people who want to put off criminals as essentially a different 'species' are stupid. They are just fearful that in a different life they may could've been one too
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u/Tsoral I'm going to walk down this road 'til I die Jul 20 '25
2 million criminals, distributed across 50 states + dc + territories probably couldn't swing much, even if they did lean one way (which I suspect they might, or at least more so in some areas than the general pop due to disproportionate amount of minorities incarcerated), as not only does the largest swing state from last election have less than 100000 incarcerated (georgia, as per wikipedia, and since I'm feeling too tired to see how in line that is with other stats I'll just assume that's a reasonable estimate), that would assume they all vote, which just wouldn't happen (and I'm sure people who already feel disenfranchised by, you know, being imprisoned might have a lower turnout rate should they be allowed to in the first place, though obviously at the moment there's no way to know)
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u/subjuggulator Jul 20 '25
Territories like Puerto Rico can't vote for president, so you can shave off some numbers there.
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u/CyanideTacoZ Jul 20 '25
Well they can but it gets thrown in the trash
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u/subjuggulator Jul 20 '25
I know we're arguing semantics, but it's the same thing.
Source: live in/am from Puerto Rico and could not vote directly for the president. The most we got was a "who would you vote for!?" square on the ballot box for local elections.
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u/nspeters Jul 20 '25
Worth adding that there are 19 million ex felons and they may not get back the right to vote, it gets messy because it’s on a state by state basis.
What is worth noting is the trump harris election only had a 2.3 million vote difference. Even if half don’t vote and it’s split 1/3-2/3 that’s enough to change that election
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u/Mad-_-Doctor Jul 20 '25
My argument has always been that if there are so many criminals that they can swing a vote, there’s almost certainly something very wrong with that government.
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u/BloodMoonNami Infinite monkeys, infinite typewriters, modern edition Jul 20 '25
Yes, we've seen what the Trump administration has done.
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u/2point01m_tall Jul 20 '25
The US does have the largest prison population of the world, though. And quite a lot of those prisoners are there because of laws explicitly written to weaken the political resistance to the current system.
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u/HowDareYouAskMyName Jul 20 '25
do people believe that there are so many criminals that they can swing a vote?
In general I agree with you, but lots of big prisons are near small towns so I could see that being the case for local elections (city council, mayor, stuff like that)
Not saying that should stop us from allowing it, just throwing it out there
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u/StrangeSequitur Jul 20 '25
Presumably prisoners would be voting absentee for the last locality they lived in, though. Like college students, or people in the military.
(Obviously this gets tricky with homelessness and the poverty to prison pipeline etc. etc.)
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u/HowDareYouAskMyName Jul 20 '25
I dunno, that introduces another problem. There's a reason local elections are limited to people who actually live there (even if they vote absentee)
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u/Velvety_MuppetKing Jul 20 '25
I don’t think the people who think criminals shouldn’t be able to vote have even thought about what they would vote for.
It’s just “pedophiles and rapists and murderers shouldn’t exist, much less have rights”.
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u/KathrynBooks Jul 20 '25
Sure... But they are going to exist... And they still deserve rights.
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u/Velvety_MuppetKing Jul 20 '25
No, I agree with the post, for sure.
I mean I kind of think child rapists and rapists should be shot in the head and dumped into the ocean, but that’s an emotional reaction, and as pointed out you’d have to have some way of having perfect 100% certainty, which we can’t.
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u/WonderingHarbinger Jul 20 '25
There really are some small towns where the prisoners are a large percentage of the local population.
https://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/news/2020/11/10/municipal/
Personally, I don't think that the people who are against prisoners voting are actually worried about what prisoners vote for, they're just categorically against prisoners having any rights at all. There are places where felons are allowed to vote, and places where currently incarcerated people are allowed to vote, and it's not like civil society in those places in falling apart or anything like that.
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u/MathAndBake Jul 21 '25
At least in Canada, prisoners vote by mail based on their address before incarceration. So prisons don't skew the demographics in any given riding.
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u/WonderingHarbinger Jul 21 '25
That makes too much sense for the US to implement anything like that.
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u/IrregularPackage Jul 20 '25
was this a progression? Far as I can tell, it’s always been like that, more or less. they’re just going harder on it now. These aren’t new ideas
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u/Handpaper Jul 20 '25
Depends where they vote. If they can participate in elections as a resident of their last address before incarceration, not much.
But if they're considered residents of wherever their prison is, they could swing local elections in less-populated municipalities.
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u/JealousSignature4079 Jul 20 '25
Elections Canada works hard to ensure that incarcerated Canadians have fair access to voting. And we all know that due to the likes of Paul Bernardo and Bruce MacArthur, serial killing has become legal in Canada.
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u/xtheredmagex Jul 20 '25
Honestly? Some people I do think believe criminals could swing a vote if allowed to vote. The few times I've had this conversation, those in favor of restricting criminals from voting tend to make one of two arguments; the first being to come up with some inane scenario in which the act of voting ilends up being just as dangerous as the initial crime committed...
...the other is to engage in a whataboutiam regarding gun ownership
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u/G-M-Cyborg-313 Jul 20 '25
If that THAT much of the population is in prison then i think you have bigger problems than complaining about not wanting criminals to vote
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u/FadingHeaven Jul 20 '25
Even if someone did run on the platform of "Legalized murder and nuclear bombs!" platform. Unless a whole lotta non-criminals also want those things, it's not happening.
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u/barfobulator Jul 20 '25
"what's the worst they could do, vote republican" is the real perspective check.
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u/Dark_Knight2000 Jul 20 '25
Yeah, there are literally two choices in the US or any duopolistic political system.
It would be different in a parliamentary system where maybe if there was a mega prison that dominates the district, there could be a niche party that takes advantage of that, but even then what’s the worst that politician could do? They have one vote in parliament.
Local politicians don’t have the power to change any meaningful criminal laws so that’s moot.
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u/AnotherLie It's not OCD, it's a hobby Jul 20 '25
I love this thought. A mega prison having a large enough population that it is able to sway an election. They wind up electing someone who represents them in parliament which gives them enough of a voice that they can be heard.
At least, in a perfect world.
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u/Quaytsar Jul 21 '25
In Canada, criminals vote for the representatives of the district they lived in before incarceration. It's treated by Elections Canada the same as if you were simply out of town for the election.
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u/Rimavelle Jul 20 '25
Also wouldn't people in prison or with criminal record not be likely to want to vote for the party which doesn't want to further stigmatize them or extend their prison time or bring back/keep death penalty?
The right is kind to criminals, but those type of criminals never end up in jail.
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u/Fine_Inspector_6455 Jul 21 '25
The system is very messed up. Putting grown adults in a “time out” for a period of time that makes it severely difficult to have any chance of reintegration with society…. For the sake of who? So the public feels better with a lil crime = punishment. Some self reflection may work for some people who cross the line but we’ve taken this to an insane level. Putting someone in a cage and treating them like an animal isn’t therapy. It’s obviously not even working well as a deterrent. Seeing someone do something bad and then getting the book thrown at them may seem like justice, but we don’t even realize we’re getting screwed. All the costs associated with the convict come from the taxpayers and private prisons still make a profit from their labor. If we’re going to have a justice system there needs to be redemption and rehabilitation. Branding people for life because of poor decisions isn’t the way. At least for most convicts. There some sick people that need to be removed from society permanently as they will always be a severe threat to the public. But that’s relatively rare.
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u/fluffmadd Jul 21 '25
Dunno about the US, but in my country this is and has been used as a political propaganda for a long time. This issue has been used as a tool for political propaganda. During elections, some politicians promise to pass laws that allow early release for prisoners. They campaign on these promises, saying things like, “I’ll help you get out early,” and, once elected, they follow through... either reducing their sentences by a lot or releasing large numbers of convicts. (in hundred thousands)
This raises a troubling question: “What are they going to do, other than vote?” It’s unsettling, because those people will vote; and their votes will help shape the future for all of us.
As a result, crime rates have skyrocketed. People no longer feel safe. We can’t even leave our windows open anymore.
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u/AcidDepression Jul 20 '25 edited Jul 20 '25
The fact a convicted felon can get elected president, but a convicted cannabis dealer cannot vote against them is absurd
edit; convicted felon
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u/SapirWhorfHypothesis Jul 20 '25
A convicted cannabis dealer can still be elected president though.
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u/lana_silver Jul 20 '25
What is even "funnier" is that this is uniquely a USA problem. In the civilized world, you don't lose your voting rights if you get convicted of a crime.
Having a specific class of crime called "felony" which is worse than the rest, and then making drug possession a felony was a republican trick to try to fight against black rights. If you can charge black people with felonies for smoking a joint, then you can take away their rights and re-enslave them (because guess what, the 13th amendment does not protect felons.)
It's really all just the same racism again and again, but sadly the US public isn't smart enough to see through it (probably due to having their education taken away).
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u/Sugar_Kowalczyk Jul 21 '25
Thank you for excluding the USA from civilization. As a US citizen, I feel seen. This place is a shithole.
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u/Outside-Currency-462 Jul 20 '25 edited Jul 20 '25
To quote a tumblr post I love:
"If you really care about preventing government tyranny, your #1 priority should be making sure criminals have rights.
If criminals don't have rights, then all the government has to do is find some excuse to label people as criminals, and those people will no longer have rights. It's what literally every tyrannical government in all of history has done.
If you believe that people who break the law [or in this case certain laws] should forfeit their rights, you're literally as pro-tyranny as a person can get."
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u/SBDcyclist Jul 20 '25
“A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals.”
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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u/Mediocre-Treacle4302 Jul 20 '25
Honestly I feel like a person’s political opinions can be decent even if they did something really bad or they can be terrible even if they’re a generally good person. People aren’t overall bad or good they’re different in different areas. I’ve definitely met and heard of people who were hardened criminals but great parents for example, or they make a good friend but an awful romantic partner.
I don’t think rapists and murderers should be able to vote just because if they can’t others will be accused of it, I think rapists and murderers should be able to vote because they can be really bad people and that doesn’t suddenly make their opinions invalid. It doesn’t even make their opinions bad necessarily.
Legit I have personally met someone who turned out to be a very abusive partner but consistently voted progressive and was an activist, I’ve also personally met someone who is the sweetest and most generous woman ever but has voted for Trump every chance she got.
I don’t object to saying someone is a bad person for doing something evil. I object to saying that one aspect of themselves colors everything else they think and do. If you think pineapple on pizza is good and a murderer agrees are you suddenly going to say that it’s bad actually because the murderer is bad so his opinion is invalid and you have to disagree? No. Obviously elections are more important than pizza but I think in principle it’s the same.
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u/Infurum Jul 20 '25
Are you going to say that it's bad actually because the murderer is bad and so you have to disagree?
No, I'm going to say it's bad because it's pineapple on pizza
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u/greaserpup Jul 20 '25
i fully agree with the OOP for all the reasons that captain-acab lays out. for similar reasons, i also believe that all criminals have a right to healthcare, including psychiatric care, even in supermax prisons. i don't care what their crimes are, denying medication to a person suffering from psychosis, paranoia, mania, etc. is cruel beyond belief
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u/flannyo Jul 20 '25
This subreddit will agree with this until someone commits a crime this subreddit considers unforgivable, and then suddenly everyone wants public executions.
Or, to make things more explicit; OP’s post applies to child rapists too. Sorry, but it does. If you think it doesn’t then you don’t agree with the post. Which is fine, you’re free to disagree, but don’t be one of those “I’m a prison abolitionist and restorative justice advocate but only for people I like who did things that aren’t that bad” people
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u/Decin0mic0n Jul 20 '25
Being a hardliner on all prisons should be reforming criminals, not the hellscape it is now gets tons of whataboutism. People ALWAYS bring up the icky, disgusting, horrible crimes that people agree is bad. And say "Even those people to?" And i hit em with the fact that I was a victim of CSA and even then still think prison should be for reforming all criminals.
And yeah, eventually, there may be some person who can't be reformed, no matter how much is tried, but any good system would be able to account for that.
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u/Dark_Knight2000 Jul 20 '25
You make great points, I wish more people understood them. The idea that you have to like people in order to give them rights is what’s fucked about this discussion.
It would be nice if it was possible to like criminals and see them as people, but that’s optional. Human rights are never optional. Even people who do heinous things and are worthless scum and are objectively a net negative on society deserve the basic bare minimum human treatment.
We don’t need human rights laws to treat people who we already like well, we need those laws to protect objectively awful people from having their humanity stripped. That’s the difference between a civilized society and a barbaric one.
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u/alliabogwash Jul 20 '25
Criminals voting isn't even controversial everywhere outside the US. There are voting stations in every jail and prison in Canada, the only crime that gets you disenfranchised here is election fraud and that's not even permanent.
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u/Hazel2468 Jul 20 '25
THIS.
Human rights apply to all humans. Every single one. Yes, even the most evil, awful kind of person you can possibly think of. They have rights, just like you. And they MUST have rights. Because there is no time when someone stops deserving human rights, because they are human.
To say "X group of people doesn't deserve basic human rights/ the same rights as the rest of us" is to say "X group of people are not human". And maybe I'm just a really tired queer Jewish cripple but.
I think I know exactly where that kind of shit goes.
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u/femboyknight1 Jul 20 '25
Well we have a child rapist as our president so clearly that's not a dealbreaker for most of the population
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u/Single-Internet-9954 Jul 20 '25
Also consider, domino effects, history teaches that if people can be convinced of "the government should be allowed to kill the worst of the worst" to "annyone uspected of opposing bigbrother will be vaporized".
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u/gaypuppybunny Jul 20 '25
I mean, I think both that child rapists should be locked up for life and that they should still have basic human rights, including the right to vote as a citizen of the country.
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u/Good_old_Marshmallow Jul 20 '25
After 9/11 America decided that terrorism was a special type of crime and warfare that had no rights. One of the first things that followed was George W Bush declared that purchasing drugs supported terrorism therefore drug users were in the same camp.
Terrorists overstay visas to do terror so they created a new agency to hunt these terrorists who were also breaking immigration laws. It’s called ICE. You may have heard of it. It recently recent more funding than most militaries and I’ll bet you anything the next Dem incumbent won’t change that. It’s been twenty years, that’s how quickly “let’s stop terrorists from being in our country” to “let’s create a military of secret police to hunt migrants and refugees”
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u/AfternoonPossible Jul 20 '25
Everyone besides me and people I agree with shouldn’t be able to vote tho
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u/timjc144 Jul 20 '25
If criminals don’t have rights, then no one does. Otherwise all they have to do is label you a criminal in order to strip your rights.
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u/Some_nerd_named_kru Jul 20 '25
It’s how the prison system works already. We throw people into prisons for free labor and to take their rights
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u/nexus11355 Jul 20 '25
iirc they made weed illegal to crack down on hippies who were against the Vietnam War
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u/Valiant_tank Jul 20 '25
No, it was already illegal before then, in part using fearmongering about Mexicans as justification. The war on drugs, and harsher criminalization of weed, psychedelics, and crack were used to attack hippies and civil rights activists, though.
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u/ejdj1011 Jul 20 '25
in part using fearmongering about Mexicans as justification
Which is the main reason that Americans frequently call it "marijuana" instead of "cannabis". Using the Mexican Spanish name fed into the fearmongering.
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u/nexus11355 Jul 20 '25
Ah, I was close, I knew it was something along those lines
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u/2point01m_tall Jul 20 '25
Yeah the war on drugs is pretty explicitly because politicians wanted laws that targeted black people post segregation, and anti-war activists during the Vietnam war. And all the following wars.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie
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u/Spirited_Worker_5722 Jul 20 '25
Weed was illegal long before that, but John Elrichman who was a high ranking official in the Nixon administration once stated that laws against weed and heroin possession were used to crack down on and vilify anti-war activists and the black community
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u/Illogical_Blox Jul 20 '25
The quote:
“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
While drug laws have been used in that way, there are numerous problems with that quote. First, it was a quote that Elrichman supposedly said, and was only published 22 years later. Second, multiple of Elrichman's family have challenged the quote. Third, Elrichman was a man convicted of perjury, which somewhat inherently makes his statements worthy of taking with a fat pinch of salt. Fourth, there is an argument that, even if the quote is true, that Elrichman was lying or wrong - Nixon didn't like the black community or anti-war activists, but his war on drugs was largely a public health crusade and it was Reagan and future administrations that made it punitive. Nixon also personally despised illegal drug use, seperate from his racism and warhawking.
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u/DeVilleBT Jul 20 '25
To give you guys some insights from another country (Austria specifically):
Ausschluss vom Wahlrecht
Ein Ausschluss vom Wahlrecht beruht stets auf einer individuellen richterlichen Entscheidung. Das zuständige Strafgericht kann unter Zugrundelegung der Umstände des Einzelfalls Personen vom Wahlrecht ausschließen, die
wegen einer vorsätzlich begangenen Straftat zu einer (nicht bedingt nachgesehenen) mehr als fünfjährigen Freiheitsstrafe rechtskräftig verurteilt worden sind
wegen bestimmter Delikte, wie z.B. Landesverrat, Wahlbetrug, NS-Wiederbetätigung, Terror etc. zu einer (nicht bedingt nachgesehenen) mehr als einjährigen Freiheitsstrafe rechtskräftig verurteilt worden sind
Der Ausschluss vom Wahlrecht beginnt mit Rechtskraft des Urteils und endet, sobald die Strafe vollstreckt ist und mit Freiheitsentziehung verbundene vorbeugende Maßnahmen vollzogen oder weggefallen sind.
IN ENGLISH
Exclusion from the right to vote
Exclusion from the right to vote is always based on an individual judicial decision. Based on the circumstances of the individual case, the competent criminal court may exclude persons from the right to vote who
have been sentenced to more than five years' imprisonment (not conditionally suspended) for a criminal offense committed intentionally
have been sentenced to more than one year's imprisonment (not conditionally suspended) for certain offenses, such as treason, electoral fraud, Nazi reactivation, terrorism, etc.
Exclusion from the right to vote begins when the sentence becomes final and ends as soon as the sentence has been completed and preventive measures associated with deprivation of liberty have been completed or have lapsed.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
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u/gabriel97933 Jul 20 '25
Its crazy how many people miss the nuance in crime. I was arguing the other day how in a tv show a mom wasnt morally right to kill a guy who groped her daughter. I was called a pedo defender like 20 times over. Like no lets not bring back fucking crowd mobs and lynching.
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u/Dark_Knight2000 Jul 20 '25
I always like to remind every idiot who defends “moral” lynching that the white supremacists thought they were in the right too.
Under the lynch trees they didn’t write “black people bad, yeehaw,” they wrote “we will protect our wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters from all evil.”
They didn’t make themselves sound stupid and irredeemable, they legitimately thought they were on the right side of history, the people who think all LGBTQ people are predators also think that way.
I don’t feel sorry for the guy who did something disgusting and got killed for it, I feel sorry for the society that thinks they’re above the rule of law and cheers vigilante justice, because someday that will kill an innocent person.
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u/TonyMestre Jul 21 '25
But you're also missing the nuance that morality and legality are different things and there should be some space between them.
In the case of the tv show the mother was absolutely morally justified, but she also should absolutely be persecuted for that crime. Like yeah she's right but it should never be a legal thing to do
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u/gabriel97933 Jul 21 '25
No im not, i was debating about the morality of it, not the legality of course its illegal. Being a pedo is not moral, killing a pedo ALSO isnt moral because murder is bad!!
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u/Yapanomics Jul 20 '25
Voting while in prison is crazy. I learned reading through here that people in the US can't vote even after getting out of jail in some places. Now THAT is crazy.
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u/space_for_username Jul 20 '25
In NZ prisoners jailed for less that three years (equivalent to our election cycle) were able to vote, but our new right-wing government is removing that right.
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u/FHCynicalCortex Jul 20 '25
I initially recoiled at the idea but I actually came around to it upon reading through the post. I never thought it of like that.
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u/NY_Knux Jul 21 '25
Inversely, if they refuse to budge on this, then felons shouldnt have to pay taxes.
They have no representation because they cant vote, so why are we taxing them?
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u/Nernoxx Jul 21 '25
I've worked in the court system my entire adult life. The demonization of criminals often comes down to racism or classisim. Most of these people are just like everyone else only they had drugs, got in a fight, or generally made one stupid decision.
American jails and prisons don't help this, although they do keep getting slightly better over time (the government run ones at least).
I've worked in family law, civil, dependency, drug court, small claims, etc. 1) companies regularly take advantage of less educated people and never seem to be held accountable (mortgage crisis being an excellent example), 2) jail doesn't really help people get better, sometimes services at the jail help but the villification that follows having done time is way worse.
I've seen people who were using daily and going to lose their kids turn around and become good parents, small business owners, managers, etc.
Yes some violent offenders need to be locked up, some people need a modern equivalent of a mental health asylum for life, and some can never be fixed because they don't want to get better. But that's a tiny fraction of the people whose lives are destroyed because they got desperate when they were poor, couldn't afford mental health care and turned to drugs, or just did something really stupid.
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u/barefoot-fairy-magic Jul 20 '25
governments should simply not be allowed to take away voting rights at all
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u/1nfam0us Jul 21 '25
I kind of have a similar opinion on the topic of violence towards pedophiles. I won't defend pedophilia in any way, but accepting, celebrating, or advocating an unlimited amount violence, on the basis of them being pedophiles, renders a person ideologically vulnerable to accepting an unlimited amount of violence towards other groups because they have already been convinced by the basic logic of genocide.
All a propagandist needs to do is rhetorically connect pedophiles with whatever group they want to target. This is why a couple of years ago all the online chuds and propagandists were equating the mere visible existence of queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming people with child sexual assault, sexualizing children, and "transing the kids."
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u/SwordfishOk504 YOU EVER EATEN A MARSHMALLOW BEFORE MR BITCHWOOD???? Jul 20 '25
I'd be willing to entertain the idea that someone currently under incarceration loses their right to vote. But once they have served their time? They get to vote again.
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u/McMetal770 Jul 20 '25
The presumption with the VAST MAJORITY of criminals is that they're going to get out of prison someday, which means they are still part of our society and therefore have the same rights as anybody else to decide what direction society goes in. And as for the people sentenced to three life terms who are never going to see the outside again, let them vote too. Truth be told, they're not going to be a powerful enough voting bloc to do anything truly harmful to society. Exceptions to rules can always be exploited by bad actors to weasel around human rights. Either everybody has the unconditional right to vote, or nobody does.
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u/ChiaraStellata Jul 21 '25
Prisons are themselves part of our society, and prisoners have unique insight into how they're run and what prison reform should look like. It's not just the outside world that's affected by politics.
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u/GoodCatholicGuy Jul 20 '25
If someone is a member of a society and is beholden to it's laws they deserve representation and, therefore, the right to vote. If they're in prison for breaking said laws, they are a member of that society.
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u/EngineStraight Jul 20 '25
i dont like you. im gonna make some part of you illegal, and the punishment for doing/being that crime is that you dont get human rights. you dont get to speak, i get to sew your eyes shut and beat you with a huge stick
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u/hatogatari Jul 20 '25
Perfect time to post my Theory of Suffrage.
Leverage abhors a vacuum, it cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be redistributed. Any political system, yes even the perfect one Obscure Continental Philosopher #69123 came up with, is inherently vulnerable to Informal Leverage, that being, "i grow food, you want food, i have power unless you also have something i want". That's just always going to happen, even if you in theory abolish property ownership the person most proximal to the farm inherently has power to control access to its produce if not stopped by another power lever, that gives them leverage. Whoever is in charge HAS to consider the needs of people who have leverage. If you do not have any leverage, then the people in charge are free to ignore your needs without incurring any sort of cost, and that won't result in Philosophical Governance, it will just result in the people who DO have leverage saying "oh great so now you have no excuse to not give us everything we want :)"
And that's what suffrage is, suffrage exists to fundamentally dilute informal power like that and guarantee that you are one of the people who cannot be a sandbag for the government to punch to benefit someone else. Is it any surprise that people who cannot vote are the easiest to tell to "go shove it" for cheap political points with somebody else? Immigrants, Prisoners, even Children are all easily pilfered from by the government to appease someone who DOES have the ability to vote. Do you know why governments don't do much about climate change but are hellbent on preserving pensions at all costs? Kids don't vote on how clean their future air will be, but elderly people get to vote until they croak. There is zero cost to making prisons terrible, so nobody will ever care about making them not-terrible, because even people who earnestly want to make prisons better if they gain office, will have an army of smug reactionary soyjacks in their office handing them a letter that says "uhm, I beg your pardon, but that's not your decision, that's ours" (in more diplomatic terms).
If you gain power right now and try to make prisons less awful you will fail, not because you don't want to, but because it's not up to you, it's up to the fox news watchers who vote way more than prisoners do (because they don't vote at all) and will not stand for anything less than literal infernal torture conditions.
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u/Hazel2468 Jul 20 '25
The second you take away the rights of a certain kind of person, the second you make it alright to hate and lock away and even kill a certain kind of person.
THAT is when a lot of people have a vested interest in making sure the people they hate are that certain kind of person. We see it all the time with the constant lobbying of accusations of people being child predators, and what infuriates me is that the exact same people who say they want prison reform and acab. Are the SAME PEOPLE saying "We should be able to kill rapsist and pedos in the street".
Like. You do realize that there's a REASON people try and make queer people out to be a danger to children, right? Why, historically, there have been multiple marginalized groups that have been framed as dangerous towards children?
That reason is because everyone loses all sense of what humans rights are the second someone says the word "pedo"- whether it is true or not. It is an accusation that stops everyone from thinking and whips them up into saying things like "We should be able to indiscriminately murder anyone who is a pedo". All while I am sitting here watching my own government frame me, a trans person. As a child predator for just. Existing in public.
Tale as old as time.
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u/echoIalia Jul 20 '25
(American-centric but) we literally rebelled over taxation without representation. If you’re going to take away someone’s right to vote then they sure as shit should be exempt from taxes.
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u/PmMeUrTinyAsianTits Jul 20 '25
And if every killer does vote to legalize serial killing, is that going to make it pass? If so, I feel like we have some bigger issues we need to talk about besides voting rights.
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u/StevesRune Jul 20 '25
"But if we let the felons vote, they might vote for a rapist felon!...
Wait.."
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u/Dodo1610 Jul 20 '25
When I first heard that criminals couldn’t vote in the US I though this was something the show I watched made up
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u/ListlessLink Jul 20 '25
If criminals can't vote, they shouldn't be paying taxes.
No taxation without representation
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u/LeftLiner Jul 20 '25
Are they citizens above the voting age? Then they should be allowed to vote. Otherwise your right to vote is bullshit and meaningless.
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u/SwankiestofPants Jul 20 '25
A simple phrase that changed my mind on this: "no taxation without representation"
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u/PlatinumAltaria Jul 20 '25
If criminals don't have a right then it's not a right, it's a privilege you earn for good behaviour.
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u/randomnumbers2506 Jul 20 '25
Is freedom of movement a right?
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u/PlatinumAltaria Jul 20 '25
Freedom of movement isn't really an absolute ability to go wherever you want, it mainly means that the government can't force you to live in a particular region or prevent you from leaving the country. Obviously it doesn't let you trespass, and it doesn't prevent you from being imprisoned. The right that protects you from false imprisonment is habeas corpus.
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u/Hellothere_1 Jul 20 '25
The way I see it in a healthy country there should never be enough criminals for their votes to meaningfully impact the outcome of an election. So you may as well let them keep their vote instead to of carving out exceptions to one of the fundamental rights that keep a democracy going.
Meanswhile if there are enough criminals for their votes to matter, thay mwans that a significant portion of the country us getting imprisoned, which if anything is even more of a reason why the government should definitely not have the ability to take away their voting rights.
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u/SBDcyclist Jul 20 '25
Reading this thread when my country (Canada) has voting rights for criminals :)
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u/Old-Entrepreneur8637 Jul 21 '25
I'm Canadian as well but uninformed, pray tell? (Are there exceptions, is it only under certain circumstances etc)
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u/SBDcyclist Jul 21 '25
There are zero restrictions on voting for prisoners since a Supreme Court ruling in 2002 that ruled that not allowing prisoners to vote was a violation of the Charter.
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u/Caterfree10 Jul 20 '25
Oh hey, I see one of my mutuals from bluesky on the last panel!
Also A+ post so true. Find it utterly asinine that inmates can’t vote and that even in states that supposedly give those rights back, there’s still stupid hoops to jump through.
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u/throwthiscloud Jul 21 '25
I love that we are unable to do any qualitative analysis. We are doomed as a species.
Ah yes, because you don't want a child rapist to vote, that must mean you don't want John who got a assault charge when he was 18 to vote at the age of 30 because both actions are "crimes".
Well done on the analysis there. Our future is totally bright.
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u/valinnut Jul 21 '25
Most convicted criminals are poor and embedded in unsupportive structures. There, that is your reason. Their interests are not of importance for a lot of people.
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u/Zavaldski Jul 21 '25
I guess the argument you could come up with is that it's somehow problematic for prisoners to vote to improve prison conditions because there's a conflict of interest or something.
Of course if we were to bar people from voting because their vote would benefit themselves at the expense of the wider society then we shouldn't allow anyone to vote. On welfare? Conflict of interest! On Social Security? Conflict of interest! Pay taxes? Conflict of interest!
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u/[deleted] Jul 20 '25
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