Overcriminalization significantly undermines human flourishing and social well-being by harming the family, social networks, and social citizenship. Additionally, it prevents capable men and women from utilizing their creative capacities in the marketplace. This creates vast issues involving relations with family while incarcerated and reintegration into society after release. On the economic side, draconian cash bail systems undermine justice through basing someone's ability to attain pre-trial release upon their wealth, not their actual threat to society.
"Felony disenfranchisement has an undeniable racial present, not just past. Black Americans constitute 2.2 million of the disenfranchised, banned from voting at four times the rate of all other racial groups combined. Its history betrays a truth the nation has continuously refused to recognize in the experience of its most intimately reviled child: enslaved Africans and their descendants"
The Marshall Project
August 20, 2018
Read More"The organizers explained to the detainees that because they had not yet been convicted of a crime, they were all likely eligible to vote in November. They could vote for Illinois’ governor or even elect the sheriff who ran the jail where they were detained, they told the women. "
Huffington Post
August 2, 2018
Read More"Losing the right to vote is among numerous other consequences of being convicted of a crime. This so-called “civil death” suggests that person is considered dead to society. The larger political consequence is a lack of representation in government of a large group of citizens who are largely poor and people of color."
Truthout Magazine
August 2, 2018
Read More"It’s one thing to make it legal for people to vote again, and another to ensure they know about it. Voters and even local officials may not realize what’s changed."
The Marshall Project
August 1, 2018
Read More"Prison gerrymandering, which counts prisoners as residents of their prisons rather than their home communities for the purpose of drawing political boundaries, stacks the political deck against medium size and large cities. The process effectively gives communities around prisons, which are disproportionately white and rural, additional representation while stealing people and votes from home communities, which are generally urban areas. This can produce results that are unfair, even absurd."
USA Today
July 25, 2018
Read More"The lawsuit claims that all five people — residents who have been incarcerated or are related to someone who has been incarcerated — have been harmed by Connecticut’s practice of counting incarcerated people in the places they are locked up instead of the place they reside, for the purposes of redistricting."
New Haven Independent
June 28, 2018
Read More"The right to vote should never be tied to the level of one's debt. It's a moral issue and if you want people to come back and transition back into society, one of the fundamental tenets of society is the right to be able to vote."
Birmingham News
October 4, 2017
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