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Why is it always Florida making trouble for America? Maybe we need to cut it and CA loose.
What is repugnant is to continue to punish people who have served their time & paid their debt to society.
By the way this Amendment has about 70% support here so it will probably pass.
What is repugnant is to continue to punish people who have served their time & paid their debt to society.
By the way this Amendment has about 70% support here so it will probably pass.
They may have served their time but nobody knows if they paid their debt to society and their victims....the smart money says no, they are WAY in the red.
They may have served their time but nobody knows if they paid their debt to society and their victims....the smart money says no, they are WAY in the red.
Fine if you don't want them voting and restoring their civil rights I say they shouldn't pay taxes either.
I will vote YES to restore their voting rights.
FYI - Some of these felons never spent any time in prison. Rather, they served probation. In Florida, one can be a felon if caught tresspassing on a construction site and lose their voting rights forever.
True, there's a lot of things that shouldn't be a felony but are.
Or things that are a felony in one State but not the next.
So two people in two different states can commit the exact same crime, one will lose his voting rights and one will not.
I'm pretty sure, or at least I hope that is not on the books anymore...... but I once read that there was a law in Texas that made possession of more than 6 sex toys a felony.
We must not confuse a criminal conviction and subsequent removal from society (an often essential part of the process of rehabilitation) with a need to remove the essential human right to vote. This was the basis of the recent EU decision to insist that the UK gives the vote to its prisoners. Europe has a wide and varied response to the issue. Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland have no ban on prisoner voting rights. In 13 other European countries, electoral disqualification depends on the crime committed or the length of the sentence.
The [UK's] 1983 Mental Health Act uses a system of individual assessment to determine a patient’s eligibility to vote. Perhaps, using a similar system, the decision to allow prisoner voting rights could be based on the nature and severity of their crime? A process could be set up that would follow a parallel path to parole procedure as part of tracking a prisoner’s rehabilitation and readiness to re-enter society.
Isn't Switzerland the country that has Europe's loosest gun ownership laws? If you consider them taking the correct approach about gun ownership, then why not prisoner's right to vote?
Well its debatable that they have "paid their debt to society"....finishing a sentence doesn't mean they are better people or even that those harmed have been made whole. It just means they have served out their sentence of incarceration as imposed by the court.
But society as a whole has deemed that felons should not have the franchise of voting, for whatever reason. Perhaps that someone who has exercised such poor judgment isn't qualified to participate in managing society.
Or that their experiences of incarceration, if allowed to inform their decision making process, would unfairly present a bias against law and order, (for example, such persons would be more likely to vote for people who also have little or no regard for the rule of law, and thus undermine the purposes of governance itself).....and in a society based on the rule of law, giving people who have blatantly disregarded that rule, is self-destructive or ultimately self-defeating.
Does it really matter what the reasons are? Since "society" says so, that's enough of a reason by itself, given that this is an acceptable criteria in the system that society has established.
Nobody questions WHY other decisions made by "society" are the way they are....so why would you question this one?
No, serving time doesn't guarantee rehabilitation, but for every person who is serving time there are a far larger number out on the streets committing crimes who will never be convicted, and 30% of adults in the US have been arrested at least once, so what do you do about them? I'm sure that some of them have also failed to become "better people" https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-man...ink-1438939802
Disenfranchisement of felons, whether accomplished through limiting their access to housing and jobs or the denial of voting rights does not serve the public well. After a person serves their time the best thing that can happen for all of us is that they become a productive member of society, when that occurs they are less likely to recidivate.
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