Prisoner Strikes

[Dill]

(08-21-2018, 08:03 AM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: I sort of agree, but there's simply some people I am not sure I want to have the same amount of say as me when it comes to deciding a county/state/country's future.

I mean, do you really want a convicted child pornographer to have the same vote/voting power as you? Or do you want Bernie Madoff to be able to have an equal say as you on any matters that involve money? That white nationalist who murdered the girl with his car in Charlottesville would get the same vote as you when it comes to who should lead our country.

In the end, I don't really see a good way to split the ones you don't want from the pack.

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As for the rest of your post, I think rehabilitation only works for those who want it, which isn't as much as an optimist might like to believe. If you found it morally easy to rob a bank/mug a person/rape a person/whatever, I don't think there's a whole lot you can do. It would work for the people who had like crimes of passion, or driven to sudden impulses, but there's also just a lot of naturally bad people out there. You also can't cure stupid.

I think this strike will probably have the exact same effect as the 2016 one that I feel like the vast majority of the country didn't knew happened. Nothing. Regular folk have enough crap to worry about in their own lives to worry about a carjacker/drug dealer/fraudster/manslaughterer/etc complaining about things.

I do agree that prison labor shouldn't be a for-profit venture, but I fully agree that prison labor should be a thing to offset the cost of their incarceration. I also think that some prisons are already too soft with TVs, gyms, libraries, multiple hot meals a day, free education, hot water, fresh laundry... those are things that not even everyone who isn't in prison get to enjoy.

If people have done their time, then I am fine with them voting--especially if we are talking about large groups of people, hundreds of thousands in some states. Permanently having no say in politics is a worse outcome than Madoff getting a vote.  I am for this, even though it might increase the number of Trump voters out there substantially.

I think that since the mid 1980s, much prison education has been rolled back--the one thing that most worked against recidivism.  I am not aware of any "soft" prisons.  Tvs and gyms help control inmates. Libraries offer hope and education.  There may be people who are beyond help, but I wouldn't assume the majority can't learn to mend their ways in prison, if the have the opportunity and some hope of a real start once they get out of prison.  Closing libraries and reducing education discourages any change in behavior.

The big problem is no whether prisoners have tvs or the vote, so much as the legal apparatus which puts so many in prison.  Why should a country with a quarter of the population of China have double the number of prisoners as China?