In Maine, prisoners are thriving in remote jobs

If we get serious about actual rehabilitation in prisons instead of punishment there’s never been a better time to be able to learn just about anything on your own time. But we’d have to stop dehumanizing criminals. Dehumanization seems to be the trend that the US is leading on right now.

We can also be concerned about the incentives for prison labor - for profit prisons and all the many service providers that get paid a mint. Phone calls in many prisons are like $10. Labor gangs and the such. It’s just horrible how badly we treat people in the US for some middleman to make money.

There are also perverse electoral incentives to having a prison in your voting district. Generally the prisoners count toward your population numbers but they can’t vote. No pesky three fifths compromise.

If I had my 'druthers, disenfranchisement for felonies is anti-democratic nonsense, so people in prison should retain voting rights.

The only ethically-hard problem is which jurisdiction their vote should count in, since they cannot demonstrate it by choosing where to live. Perhaps a choice between:

1. The location of the prison, if their main interest is the conditions of their detention rather than anything outside.

2. The location of their property or close family, because they're still paying property-taxes or school levies etc. and they will be returning there later.

I've never understood the not allowing felons to vote, even while incarcerated. Does serving time really mean you should not get the same say in leaders as everyone else? As if being incarcerated isn't punishment enough, but disenfranchising on top just seems over the top.

Many people live in an area, but keep their voting registration in another. They are even able to vote without having to return to their registered polling place. Allowing inmates to vote could just as easily be handled the same way.

> I've never understood the not allowing felons to vote, even while incarcerated.

The bulk of felony-disenfranchisement laws have a clear causal connection to preventing newly-freed slaves from voting, as they were enacted alongside terrible laws ("Black codes") which did a lot of blatantly-evil stuff to force former slaves either into a shadow of their old servitude or into jail.

The problem is some people imaging voting is a prize you get for making the government happy, which can be clawed-back.

Instead, votes in a democracy are something we are owed due to the control that government exercises over our lives. If the government exerts extra control to lock you in a cage, that increases the moral necessity of a vote, rather than decreasing it.

if somebody defects against society very seriously, damaging others, i have no problem with stripping them of legal rights. this is in fact exactly the principle underlying imprisonment. constitutional rights are granted by men, not god, in service of shared prosperity; democracy is good insofar as it produces good results, not because it is the intrinsic source of good. there is no higher construct to appeal to, like this platonic ideal of democracy you're gesturing at

I can understand stripping them of the right temporarily while in prison. That's the time in which they pay their debt to society for the harm they're convicted of. Some rights are restricted during that period.

But once it's determined that the debt has been repaid and they're free to live outside and participate in society again, it seems hard to justify them not also participating in the democratic process.

> debt has been repaid

I know people say this, but I think this framing likely generates anti-prison arguments because it basically doesn’t make any sense. How does being in a cage for X years repay society? It doesn’t. It does keep the harmful person away from society though, which is a very different and useful thing (in many cases, obviously imprisonment for some crimes is dumb).