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Voting is a right. Pure and simple. If you're a citizen of the USA, you get to vote in elections. I have no problem with that right being suspended for the duration of someone's term in prison, but once they get out, they should get back as many of their fundamental rights as we can give them. Obviously, if someone is a violent criminal, we should restrict their right in the matter of access to arms, but there's no excuse for restricting their access to the ballot box.
The criminal justice system in the US is joke, anyway. We spend all our money trying to put people in jail for using drugs, and instead end up not having any resources to prosecute conglomerates and commercial monopolies that defraud people, cheat them, and manipulate our resources, and our access to free information, and our access to reasonably-priced medication. Prison in America is about the rich and powerful, who are mostly white, finding someplace off the streets to stash the poor and the sick, who are mostly black and Latino and Asian. Prison is what we do in the US instead of actually fixing our problems.
So of course it makes sense that if we can find a way to disenfranchise the poor, the sick, and the minorities along the way.... That's the American way.
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Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.
(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)
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