Guess who is now out of a job and is probably going to be homeless soon. But who really cares because nothing matters anyways

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thedatingfeminist:

queerqueerspawn:

10r3:

isn’t it weird how the US not only has a hugely large prison population and that we also make it illegal for felons to vote even after they have been rehabilitated by prison (which is actually not the case in like canada or europe where even inmates are allowed to vote apparently)?  so we have effectively taken millions of people out of the voting pool and that group of people is overwhelmingly poor and are mostly people of color?  

I just looked up stats: we have over 20% of the worlds prison population in the US alone.  1/31 adults is under some form of correctional control.  58% of the US prison population are African American or Hispanic people even though those groups combined make up only 25% of the United states population.  The NAACP estimates that if trends continue 1/3 black men alive today could expect to spend time in prison in their lifetimes… thats 1/3 black men who wouldn’t be allowed to vote.  thats a pretty sick facet of the prison industrial complex that i don’t see addressed often.  Apparently the technical term for it is “felon disenfranchisement”. 

Wait you want to hear the cherry on top? Where are most of those prisons? That’s right, rural areas that are judged to be “low risk” of criminal activity to assist prisoners escape or do something similar - so basically comparatively White areas that are largely lower population density. Except, because the census and related counts of people are based off of where people are in a given moment, those lower population densities are upped a bit, to include the incarcerated. Who can’t vote.

And this isn’t some fudging the numbers a small amount kind of thing, as some experts on felon disenfranchisement have noted:

Disenfranchisement is a strong political and electoral weapon in the competition between NYS and strongly democratic NYC, especially because approximately 80% of the black and Latino prisoners upstate come from 10 NYC neighborhoods (East Harlem, Washington Heights, Lower East Side, Hunts Point, Morrisania, Soundview, Central Brooklyn, East New York, Jamaica and St Albans). Republicans control the NY Senate whereas Democrats control the NY Assembly and the competition between the two for votes is strongly impacted by the “invisible” disenfranchised populations of upstate New York.  Peter Wagner’s study, “Importing Constituents: Prisoners and political clout in New York”, shows that at least 7 senate districts in NYS exist directly because of prisoners. In the past, senators who may not have been elected if not for their hometown prison population have, in a vicious cycle, become the heads of committees that make crime and justice policies. It is not a coincidence that only one prison has been built in New York City since 1982 whereas 40 have been built in rural cities in upstate New York: the location of prisons is a crucial political tool. Re-enfranchised ex-prisoners eventually return to their home cities and are not able to vote for or against the people who are in office thanks to their prison stay, and who control prison policy.

So yeah, holy fucking shit. Now also recall how that parallels the history of the 3/5ths rule, which insured that slave-holding areas had their (non-voting) slave populations counted for representation purposes, inflating the political power of those permitted to vote in those areas. This is part of why people discuss mass incarceration as a dimension to how slavery-based economic and political organization has continued to operate post-abolition.

And it all ties in to the prison industrial complex, where those disenfranchised people of colour imprisoned on trumped up charges or drug possession, etc., are put to work to make money hand over fist for corporations.

Slavery is still alive and well - thriving, even - in the US today. Lock up your non-white population, deny them access to the political process while using their numbers to inflate voting power for white people in their area, and make money off their essentially unpaid labour.

Ahh, don’t you just love tumblr people fudging facts. In all but 11 states felons can vote and in a few states can even vote while in prison.

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