Should Prisoners Have The Right To Vote Essay

Do prisoners have the right to vote? in my country and also in the UK, New Zealand and a few other places if you are in prison you cannot vote. Judging by the almost total lack of public discussion about this, most people in the United States at least seem to be fine with that. It is something we do not really talk about, something we do not really think about and whenever this gets brought up somebody usually says something like “if you break the law you lose your rights” or “voting is a privilege and it can be taken away” this is called Rights-Forfeiture Theory. The idea that you are usually entitled to vote, but that entitlement can be taken away if you break the law and a lot of people take this as some kind of truism, but there is more to be said about that. You do not give up all your rights when you break the law, if you gave all your rights up you could be executed without trial. You want to get certain rights restricted, like for instance your right …show more content…
There is no evidence to suggest that it aids in reform or the the deterrence. In fact it is thought to be an obstacle to rehabilitation allegedly one of the reasons that the Republic of Ireland was so keen to give prisoners The right to vote was to instill in them a sense of civic responsibility through participation. This is something that the Prison Reform Trust also supports. they are very much experts in this topic and they say that “social exclusion contributes to reoffending. It also has bad consequences that speak against doing it, in America and the UK problems arise from racially skewed criminal justice systems. In the US almost 40% of prisoners are black, which means that black people are having their voting rights removed much more than any other group and since black voters overwhelmingly vote Democrat (at least they have in every election since 1976) that will have an impact on the political