Should prisoners be allowed to vote?

[Dogs On Acid]

Arguments for and against please!

I want to see what RevLeft members have to say.

[Broletariat]

Just because the State doesn't allow them to, yes.

Otherwise, voting is basically pointless anyway, at least right now.

[Dogs On Acid]

Most prisoners are incarcerated for petty reasons anyway. And are usually in prison due to poverty or other problems caused by the capitalist system itself, directly or indirectly.

Of course they should be allowed to vote.

[Hivemind]

Put all the people who don't like the State in jail
Don't allow them to vote
???
PROFIT!

But on a more serious note, everyone should have the right to vote, you can't strip someone of rights, otherwise they are not rights, but privileges.

[Dogs On Acid]

But on a more serious note, everyone should have the right to vote, you can't strip someone of rights, otherwise they are not rights, but privileges.

Even people with psychopathic behaviour or mental issues? Children for that matter?

I'm have quite mixed feelings about these 3.

[jake williams]

I think they should be, for lots of reasons. I think the expansion of bourgeois democracy (ie. the internal expansion of bourgeois democracy, the expansion of democracy within bourgeois societies) is generally positive. It's not revolutionary but it's generally better to have it than not.

It's worth pointing out that this is one of those places where the US is a special case. The US imprisons an unbelievable part of its population compared to other advanced countries. Some principles hold in general though. In the US especially, disenfranchising prisoners causes huge distortions. Of course lots of people are in prison for stupid reasons, and broadly along racial and class lines, but that's not all there is to it. Apparently in the US, prison populations count toward county populations for representative purposes (eg. in Congress etc.), but count vote. Prisons are put disproportionately in Republican districts and add probably several hundred thousand voter-equivalents to Republican-"represented" areas.

Also, disenfranchising prisoners helps keep the prison system intact, and helps construct an ideology (or, rather, reconstruct the original racist ideology on which the US prison system is largely founded, partly inherited from Britain) whereby there are two classes of people, an enfranchised (white) "majority" protected from a minority in prison. It helps prevent the victims of the prison system from having any say politically - that is, it removes one of the few potential checks, albeit a limited one, on the bourgeois state's natural tendency to become a fascist police state.

That said, I'd like to live in a society where democratic participation in managing society has fairly little to do with voting. If people really are dangerous and anti-social, I don't want them to have a lot of power. Letting prisoners in bourgeois states vote typically doesn't entail this, but we can envision situations where people who really are dangerous are in prison, and who would be very harmful if they participated in a deeply, broadly democratic society.

[Aspiring Humanist]

Even though voting doesn't change jack shit depriving people of fundamental human rights is cruel. In fact the whole prison system is inherently cruel

[Hivemind]

Even people with psychopathic behaviour or mental issues? Children for that matter?

Children not so much, since they shouldn't be preoccupied with voting and more preoccupied with whatever it is children do (ie, having a childhood).

As for people with psychopathic behaviours, sure, why not, people with mental conditions as well, depending on the case involved.

[Dogs On Acid]

As for people with psychopathic behaviours, sure, why not, people with mental conditions as well, depending on the case involved.

Arguments please :rolleyes:

[Hivemind]

Alright. Someone psychopathic should be able to vote if they wanted to. For all you know their vote could lie somewhere completely rational, unlike many "normal" voters. It all depends on their level of intelligence. A large amount of ignorant person can and do vote, and they'll most likely vote something really stupid, yet they still have their right to vote. Someone shouldn't be excluded from voting just because of what goes on in their head. I'd sooner trust five psychopaths voting than five million people voting liberal or conservative.

As for people with mental conditions, it all depends on the condition. I know plenty of people with psychosis and extreme OCD, and they rationalize their votes more clearly and understandably than most people I know. However if it is a condition that makes them have a child like mentality, then, I don`t know. I don`t know how I feel about that, possibly because I would treat them as children when it came to voting, but I have worked with mentally disabled people before and if they want to vote, let them.

That`s at least my two cents.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Yes.

People don't seem to understand that when someone goes to prison, some of their liberty and some of their rights are taken away. In fact you could argue much of their liberty is taken away.

Not all their rights nor all their liberty are taken away, that is key. Thus, this is a question that is open to debate.

As an extreme democrat, I don't believe it is the state's right to take away the vote of anyone, so yeah, prisoners should ahve the vote.

[Fulanito de Tal]

If citizens are born with the right to vote, then the duty to prove is on those that argue for their voting right to be taken away. I have not been convinced that prisoners should not vote, so they should.

[The Intransigent Faction]

Should they have the right? Yes. Should they vote? Just as for anyone else being oppressed by our current system, the answer is no.

Leaving the question of the effectiveness (or complete ineffectiveness) of voting aside, denying prisoners the right to vote is undemocratic, particularly in the context of the United States given its incarceration rate.

Of course there is the positive in my view that being denied the right to vote would force people into other, substantive avenues of political action to overthrow capitalism, but the problem with this happening to criminals alone is clear---it would just marginalize them further. Denying them the right to vote, along with the difficulties in finding work and the general stigma towards convicts or ex-convicts, only further serves the state's interests in scapegoating for social ills.

[Jose Gracchus]

Yes. Their disenfranchisement (like the criminal disenfranchisement of felons after serving time, which was recently expanded and lengthened without any real pretext by Rick Scott's kleptocracy in Florida, so as to further remove black men from the electorate) is yet one more vehicle by which the working class, and black people, are subject to the repression of the ruling class in America.

[Apoi_Viitor]

I believe that petty thieves, drug users, and minor criminals should be given the right to vote, but prisoners who are serving serious sentences should not be. I'm not sure where the line should be placed, but I can't really see a legitimate reason for depriving the right to vote from the average non-violent criminal, and on the other hand I can't really see why someone convicted of homicide should be given the right to vote.

Anyways, if this debate were to be placed in the context of a post-revolutionary society then the responses would definitely be more interesting.


Even though voting doesn't change jack shit depriving people of fundamental human rights is cruel.

What about laws which regulate freedom of speech (ex: no yelling fire in a crowded movie theater)?

[Quail]

People who have committed crimes should have only the liberties that make them a danger to society taken away. I don't think that voting falls under that category. That's not to say that they should vote, but I see no reason to take their right to do so away.

[Tenka]

The bourgeois state incarcerates plenty of rational people, so I don't see why they shouldn't be able to vote. Not that it would make much of a difference, but that they might be inclined against the political structure which has had them locked up in the first place naturally worries some politicians.

[Dogs On Acid]

Let me add that "rights" is a creation of man himself and there is no such thing as "basic rights" or "fundamental human rights" unless someone makes these up. They are abstract.

So what might be your "right" in a modern-day Capitalist society might not be in post-revolutionary society, and of course, vice-versa.

[Angry Young Man]

Most prisoners are incarcerated for petty reasons anyway. And are usually in prison due to poverty or other problems caused by the capitalist system itself, directly or indirectly.

Of course they should be allowed to vote.

What s/he said. As for another poster saying voting is virtually pointless, in socialist society it will become meaningful. Aside from this, the lack of deprivation will make fewer criminals and those who do commit crime will be rehabbed rather than basely punished.

[syndicat]

participation in the decisions that affect the society affects everyone and thus everyone has a right to participate, and thus vote.

[Fopeos]

I've been a prisoner and am still a felon. In PA, I can vote but am barred from many jobs. I know it doesn't do any good to vote but i do it anyway. I support anyone's right to vote. Workers' have to utilize whatever political space is available. I vote Socialist Workers' Party in every election. SWP uses the campains to draw attention to struggles and to get publicity. Some are still unaware that there are alternatives to the twin parties of capital.

[Dogs On Acid]

I've been a prisoner and am still a felon. In PA, I can vote but am barred from many jobs. I know it doesn't do any good to vote but i do it anyway. I support anyone's right to vote. Workers' have to utilize whatever political space is available. I vote Socialist Workers' Party in every election. SWP uses the campains to draw attention to struggles and to get publicity. Some are still unaware that there are alternatives to the twin parties of capital.

That's the way it is in most Bourgeois Democracies mate. A strong hand on the media and news, coupled with expensive and intensive campaigning makes the People ignorant on choice.

[A Marxist Historian]

I believe that petty thieves, drug users, and minor criminals should be given the right to vote, but prisoners who are serving serious sentences should not be. I'm not sure where the line should be placed, but I can't really see a legitimate reason for depriving the right to vote from the average non-violent criminal, and on the other hand I can't really see why someone convicted of homicide should be given the right to vote.

Anyways, if this debate were to be placed in the context of a post-revolutionary society then the responses would definitely be more interesting.



What about laws which regulate freedom of speech (ex: no yelling fire in a crowded movie theater)?

Fire in a crowded theater. The history of that one is relevant. That's a quote from a US Supreme Court decision justifying throwing Socialist leader Eugene Debs in jail during World War I, on the basis that, in the judge writing the decision's opinion, that was the equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater.

You have to judge things case by case, and even as to yelling fire, it can be more complicated than that.

The SAVAK, the Iranian secret police, during the period before the fall of the Shah, several times locked the doors of crowded theaters and set fire to them with the people inside.

So if you're in a crowded theater, and you see the cops chaining the doors and pouring gasoline over the rear seats, and hooking up the blowtorch, that's a bad situation, but the best thing to do is probably to yell fire, even if it does mean people get trampled to death.

As for folk convicted of homicide, all too often they are innocent. You have to have a stronger reason to deny people of their constitutional rights than just the fact that a ruling class court has convicted them.

After the revolution is a whole different story. I certainly don't think former cops, army officers, prison guards and wealthy capitalists should have the right to vote.

The first thing that happens in all real revolutions is that the Bastille or whatever is torn down and all the prisoners are released. Sometimes that causes problems, as in the Bolshevik Revolution, when the ex-cons often proclaimed themselves anarchists, joined anarchist collectives, and started mugging and robbing allegedly "for the Revolution." Life is complicated.

Even here in America, you have the Black Guerilla Family in many American prisons, a drug etc. gang which also reads Mao and claim to be revolutionaries when not running extortion rackets inside the prisons. And some of them actually are serious about the revolution part. What ya gonna do?

-jh-

[Apoi_Viitor]

You have to judge things case by case, and even as to yelling fire, it can be more complicated than that.

Which was exactly why I put that example in. I was trying to illustrate that you can't simply conceive of rights in an absolute sense...


As for folk convicted of homicide, all too often they are innocent. You have to have a stronger reason to deny people of their constitutional rights than just the fact that a ruling class court has convicted them.

I think the current court system has elements of class repression, but overall it's more just than not. I don't know the figures for falsely convicted prisoners, but they are not that miskewed. Anyways, what would you consider a more ideal court system than the current one, which is (in theory) based upon a "jury of your peers"?

[A Marxist Historian]

Which was exactly why I put that example in. I was trying to illustrate that you can't simply conceive of rights in an absolute sense...



I think the current court system has elements of class repression, but overall it's more just than not. I don't know the figures for falsely convicted prisoners, but they are not that miskewed. Anyways, what would you consider a more ideal court system than the current one, which is (in theory) based upon a "jury of your peers"?

Thre are no figures for falsely convicted prisoners. How could there be? Who knows? Some recent studies however indicate that the numbers are vastly higher than people think.

Our system is skewed to the rich and white against the poor and nonwhite to an extreme degree. This is most obvious in drug convictions. Even though white people are, according to the sociologists who compile the statistics, *more likely* to use marijuana than black people, the number of black people doing time for the felony (!) of using or selling marijuana is vastly higher than for whites. In fact there is a tacit understanding in the legal system that you send black people not white to jail for marijuana.

And then there are the felony convictions for "crack." What is the scientific medical difference between crack and powdered cocaine? It's that smoking a crack pipe is more concentrated and thus a cheaper buzz, so more likely to be used by black people, and sniffing the powder is more expensive to get you buzzed, so more likely to be used by rich white people.

Basically, you get justice if you can afford a good lawyer, if you can't, you don't. And you have an assembly line in America to fill the jails. There are now *two million* Americans in jail, the highest population percentage *in the world.* That by the way is about the same number of people who were in the much and rightly denounced gulag system in the Soviet Union at its peak.

How many non-drug-case felons are innocent? Well, given the assembly-line mass production send 'em to jail system we have in America, probably a whole lot.

From the standpoint of working people and especially racial minorities, the American legal system isn't the best in the world, it is arguably one of the worst. The jury system is good in theory, but without a good lawyer it doesn't mean a thing.

The solution, quite simply, is socialism, so you no longer have rich people and poor people.

How would that work? Well, you'd have a real jury system, where the juries not the judges get the final word, and juries could tell the judge to get stuffed whenever they pleased, without any nonsense about "contempt of court." One of America's most contemptible institutions.

And the juries would no longer be made up of whoever can't get out of jury duty, as they'd be by rotation, everybody would serve, and get *full pay* while getting jury duty.

Judges would become merely *legal advisors* to the juries. Sooner or later one would want to abolish lawyers altogether, but meanwhile you'd ensure equality between defense and prosecution, not like now when the prosecutors have unlimited resources and defense lawyers get basically zip and, since they get paid almost nothing if assigned by the public defenders' office, have little or no resources to mount the defense of an innocent person, unless he has the cash to pay tens of thousands for his own lawyer.

And so forth.

Until then, taking voting rights away from felons is simply a disguised way of taking voting rights away from black people, since in some places as many as half of all young black men get sent to prison for one thing or another. Which is why they are so big on keeping "felons" from voting in the South. It's just the poll tax all over again.

Now that Obama is president, America is heading more rapidly back to segregation and Jim Crow every day. They're sending black mothers *to jail* for trying to integrate the schools in Connecticut and Ohio!

-M.H.-