LogFAQs > #942254745

Zeus posted...

There's a pretty f***ing good reason. If somebody is deemed unable to function in a society (thus needing to be locked up), why would you allow them to determine how that society is run?

Largely because of how difficult it is to pin down a reasonable line for "unable to function in society to enough of an extent to deserve a vote." Given the extremely wide range of reasons somebody can be jailed, "in jail" is hardly a good basis for that. Somebody who committed treason probably shouldn't be able to vote, since they've demonstrated clear contempt for the country (though even then there's an argument to be made that voting gives them a proper avenue by which to try effecting their desired political change, which is something they will need if they are to be rehabilitated), but you can't really say the same of somebody who's in jail for smoking a joint.

Like I said, it's very intuitive to say that people in jail obviously hate society too much to be trusted with a vote, but in practice it's much more nuanced than that, even before considering the potential for abuse from lawmakers that want to manipulate who can influence the government. Toss in that potential for abuse, and the issue becomes a lot less simple than it seems at first glance.

Zeus posted...

Precedent is an all-important legal concept. It's what keeps the law from being wholly arbitrary and capricious.

No, it just helps to ensure that the law is arbitrary and capricious in a consistent, predictable manner. Precedent is often deferred to because it's easier to say "we did it this way before and it worked" than to attempt to justify a different arbitrary interpretation, but if you can provide a concrete argument in favour of ignoring precedent in the current case, precedent should not be deferred to. Precedent is the legal equivalent of tradition, and it was once well-established tradition to keep slaves. Sometimes, precedents and traditions need changing.

Zeus posted...

lolwut?

Nixon started the war on drugs primarily as a means of discrediting and suppressing two voter bases that strongly opposed him: Hippies (by making pot illegal, since a disproportionate number of hippies smoked pot) and blacks (by making heroin illegal, since a disproportionate number of blacks used heroin). There's an argument to be made that that wasn't technically racist (looking just at the black half of that, obviously) because it was politically motivated rather than actually being a matter of hating black people, but the end result was a disproportionate number of black people ending up in jail on drug charges. Minorities (especially blacks) continue to be targeted disproportionately for drug charges, with white people routinely receiving lighter sentences (if being charged at all) for identical drug crimes.

The War on Drugs is very much racist in its execution, if not necessarily in its underlying concept. A massively disproportionate number of the people in prison on drug-related charges are minorities, far more than could reasonably be explained by "I guess those people just do more drugs" even if there were any other evidence to support such a hypothesis, and that's a huge problem for those communities.

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