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[Reelya]

Is it that areas with a higher ratio of males to females causes better behavior through some social pressure or is it that areas with a higher ratio of males to females exist because crime is, in general, lower in those areas, causing both less homicide (and thus more males) and less rapes?

But homicide isn't exactly a leading cause of death, so for the first part, while plausible at first read, the numbers just wouldn't add up. a 5 per 100,000 murder rate is about 0.005%, which would take hundreds of years to even affect the population by 1% either way.

So, you could say that 1% less men means twice the homicides, and then someone could say "yeah, because 1% of men were killed in those same homicides, dummy!" except that is actually dumb, because the murder rate went up to 10 per 100,000 instead of 5 per 100,000. i.e. nowhere near enough to add up to a 1% change in population composition. To get a 1% change in composition you'd need a 1 in 50 dead by murder rate. Which would be far worse than any warzone.

Also, if the men were killed off because of the high homicide rate, then you have to square that with less men = more rapes as well. Surely they'd be killing off the same men who are capable of the rapes?

EDIT: also note from the original research that they adjusted for the poverty rate yet the pattern persisted, so it's definitely not just that disadvantaged areas bleed men therefore this pattern emerges.

[NJW2000]

For me I would be fine with criminals losing voting rights while paying for their crime but 99% of all crimes should have that right returned when they've served their time (and that includes when they're let out on parole and similar lessening of the punishment).

The idea of taking away somebody's right to participate in a democracy as punishment for breaking the law is pretty horrifying to me. I get that in a lot of countries, a lot of people find the idea of rehabilitation less integral to prison than protection of the public or prison rape, but disenfranchisement is scarier than that attitude.

Laws that take away a group's right to attempt to change the law are often destructive of democracy. It's not like not letting children or the insane vote - categorically, society is pretty much in agreement that such people should have less influence on the law. Is society categorically against "criminals" voting? Might sound sensible, but who a criminal is determined by who breaks the law: it isn't a category with a (reasonably) fixed definition. So one set of bad laws, and a large group of people have no say in changing those laws, or any other laws. Makes the path to tyranny shorter.

Hate to mention the Nazis, but 1932-34 for them was largely about making sure non-Nazi groups legally couldn't participate in running the country, making total power a non-issue - removing the communists, enabling act, office of Fuhrer. As people have said, we should be careful about giving leaders tools to do this stuff.

[Frumple]

... we don't disenfranchise the insane in the US, though? Or more specifically, most states that have laws on the subject only if legally judged to be incompetent/of unsound mind, which is generally a pretty high bar. Hugely higher bar than a felony count or prison time, anyway.

It also looks like there's several more states that refuse to disenfranchise the insane for reasons of mental issues (I saw six skimming through a write up of general state laws on the subject before I stopped counting) than there are for reasons of felony (only two), so... US is actually better on that front than they are about disenfranchising felons.

Absolutely though, everybody gets the goddamn vote, be it felon or asylum patient. Drop the age limit while you're at it. If your country can't function with its criminals, crazies, and older children voting there's something seriously fucking wrong with it and you got bigger problems than who you're enfranchising.

[scriver]

For me I would be fine with criminals losing voting rights while paying for their crime but 99% of all crimes should have that right returned when they've served their time (and that includes when they're let out on parole and similar lessening of the punishment).

The idea of taking away somebody's right to participate in a democracy as punishment for breaking the law is pretty horrifying to me. I get that in a lot of countries, a lot of people find the idea of rehabilitation less integral to prison than protection of the public or prison rape, but disenfranchisement is scarier than that attitude.

Laws that take away a group's right to attempt to change the law are often destructive of democracy. It's not like not letting children or the insane vote - categorically, society is pretty much in agreement that such people should have less influence on the law. Is society categorically against "criminals" voting? Might sound sensible, but who a criminal is determined by who breaks the law: it isn't a category with a (reasonably) fixed definition. So one set of bad laws, and a large group of people have no say in changing those laws, or any other laws. Makes the path to tyranny shorter.

Hate to mention the Nazis, but 1932-34 for them was largely about making sure non-Nazi groups legally couldn't participate in running the country, making total power a non-issue - removing the communists, enabling act, office of Fuhrer. As people have said, we should be careful about giving leaders tools to do this stuff.

I'm not sure if you're arguing against me but I don't really disagree with you and I don't think there's much disagreement with what you said in my post.

[da_nang]

I think it's better if criminals get a right to vote, if only so those-in-power can't use the stripping of said right as a tool to stay in power.

[Starver]

I think there's something in not disenfranchising at all (like I said, absentee/postal vote or other cumulative 'local voting station' geared towards bringing in the blank papers from their 'home' district and sending the filled in ones back to the correct home[1]).

But they're already criminalising people to get them into prison to lose their vote (to never get it back), so criminalising people to get them into prison to temporarily lose their vote is no worse.  Legally depried of freedom, for a given period, there are definite arguments that among the socials freedoms they lose for that same period is voting.  Not saying that's necessary, nice nor non-punative in nature, but there'd be some (enough?) that wouldn't accept less on general principle.



Would it be vastly ramped up to get the same number of new "people in prison who are currently unable to vote" as they previously had new "people who have been in prison and who are forever unable to vote"?  There are optimistic and pessimistic answers to that.



[1] Might be easier to screen for 'illicit' paperwork passing back and forward (though I don't think that's a big risk, except where many and varied systems exist that are hard to easily vet), although the question of 'personal and private vote' is probably more at risk from unscrupulous middle-men working the system...  So probably just accept Postal Vote mail and return-envelope that is suitably accredited, and any problems then lie only with their Home Ground system not sending/processing the paperwork.

[Reelya]

I don't think they'd massively ramp up incarceration in response to not being able to disenfranchise people. The reason isn't because they're nice, it's because people generally take "the path of least resistance".

For example, if there's an easy way for someone to do something bad, and you prevent the easy way, people might counter-claim that "yes but there's a hard way to do it too, and everyone will switch to doing that if you block the easy way!".

But people don't actually think like that. They'll switch to doing something else entirely that's also easy, unless they have absolutely no other choices. (For example, if people are doing easy PKs in an online game, and you make that a lot harder to do, then most of them will in fact just switch to playing an entirely different game rather than game the now complex effort of being a PKer in your game. This is something game developers somehow get surprised about: they remove the exploity behavior and expect the wayward players to either become "good" players or get extra-sneaky in response. In fact, most of the exploiters just stop playing the game entirely and do something else with their time, hence the big player numbers hit if you enact this stuff that's supposed to make the game better for everyone).

So, say that arresting someone on a low-level felony and putting them in for 1 year means you've prevented them voting for conceivably the next 40 years. If you can't do that, I doubt it would be cost-effective to arrest and lock up 40 times as many people to get the same effect. In fact, that would blow out the court system and those arrests would take years to process, meaning the felony convictions would take far too long to strategically impact the next election.

In fact, they may respond by lowering the emphasis on pushing arrests, since those require cost effort, and they're now delivering only 1/40th of the effect on votes as they did before. Think about every pro-Republican prosecutor now working 40 times as hard to push convictions to get the same effect as today. They would quickly see it wasn't worth it, and they party would totally change tack on this issue. If something becomes 40 times less effective at achieving the stated goal, people don't generally do it 40 times as much to compensate, they do it less than they were.

[Starver]

So, a fellow optimist, I see...

[Reelya]

So, a fellow optimist, I see...

Not an optimist, just pointing out that they'll find some other way to fuck things.

It's basic logic. If disenfrancisement only works for the duration of the sentence, then it would be 20-40 times less cost effective than it is now. They could respond by massively ramping up the number of cases in the system, but that would mean big trial delays, and more trials just being thrown out before a conviction is even handed down. It wouldn't take a whole lot of extra cases for the average delay to be longer than the entire election cycle.

EDIT: rewrote this because I actually looked up the information, and we're all talking about stuff that isn't even realistic anyway:

As of 2018, most US states have policies that restore voting rights upon completion of a sentence. Only 3 states, Iowa, Kentucky, and Virginia permanently disenfranchise a felony convict and 6 other states limit restoration based on crimes of "moral turpitude".

Felons who have completed their sentences are allowed to vote in most U.S. states. Between 1996 and 2008, twenty-eight states changed their laws on felon voting rights, mostly to restore rights or to simplify the process of restoration.

Citation
https://www.aclu.org/issues/voting-rights/voter-restoration/felony-disenfranchisement-laws-map

So, 41 states either never had or removed felony disenfranchisement between 1996 and 2008, so we do in fact have a test case in what happened to black incarceration rates after that time:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/30/shrinking-gap-between-number-of-blacks-and-whites-in-prison/

So, those laws *have* in fact mostly been overturned already, yet (or because of it) the rate of locking up black people actually fell, rather than increased. Like I said, if you don't have the disenfranchisement there's not as much point to doing the locking-up in the first place. So the idea that they're going to round up, say, all the BLM protestors and put them in prison and deny all of them vote forever, everywhere in the USA, it's not really grounded in much reality.

Is this a leftwing version of a conspiracy theory / echo-chamber thing? because I hear a lot of people from the USA talking about felony disenfranchisement as if it's literally the law everywhere and they can't imagine how it could ever change, but a very quick fact-check shows that those are just nothing like the facts of the matter.

[delphonso]

Anybody on this forum on the streets in Portland? Right wing news outlets have painted it...in an interesting light.

I've been trying to keep up with Robert Evans' coverage of it, but so much happens every day there.

[Iduno]

Anybody on this forum on the streets in Portland? Right wing news outlets have painted it...in an interesting light.

I've been trying to keep up with Robert Evans' coverage of it, but so much happens every day there.

Nah, you're better off checking twitter for in-person news of current events.

[Starver]

"Yeah, it was weird. She's pregnant. She couldn't get her pants zipped and I was like trying to like… I had on a pair of jeans I haven't worn in a long time and couldn't get zipped either. So, I just put my belly out like hers," he said.

Yeah. Entirely plausible an excuse, right?

[Reelya]

"I promise that's just black water in my glass" as well, is he taking the piss? That's a rum and coke or something then? Not an issue for most people but this is Jerry Falwell.

[ChairmanPoo]

Can you conclusively determine that it was rum&coke all along, and not dirty water that was transsubstanced into rum&coke by the power of Jesus?

[Starver]

When he decided to post that picture, whatever was in his glass (I would have assumed Ribena, without my attention drawn to it, but then I'm from a different place) was clearly his only concern.