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Poor judgment about crime doesn’t have to mean poor judgment about people. Drunk drivers are a blight upon society. They also haven’t proven anything about their grasp of macroeconomics or foreign policy.
Either way, the most valuable boon of democracy is not wisdom of the crowds, but consent of the governed. The pressure release valve of getting to go vote rather than go pogrom. Why is it a good idea to take more away from those who allegedly have paid their debts to society?
Right, but we get consent of the governed who matter by including them in the electorate. Broadly, the electorate should reflect people with some influence and good judgement.
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There is a hypothesis called Multiple Intelligences Hypothesis, which postulates the existence of several orthogonal kinds of intellect. A competing one claims there exists a "G Factor" aka "Everything is Correlated" with remaining PC's being negligable. One could, by analogy, establish two hypotheses of judgement.
Laws of a country apply to everyone on its teritorry, but only adult citizen are usually permitted to vote. So being "governed" doesn't require one to "consent" (which you define as voting).
If they are still banned from voting, society has apparently deemed the debt to not yet been repaid in full.
I don’t really buy into multiple intelligences, as g seems to do pretty well, but that’s not necessary. Making the correct assessment on “What’s the risk-benefit on selling drugs/embezzling/assault?” is just poorly correlated with being right about “is voting X good for the country/community/me?” Partly because political strategy is a hard problem for anyone, and I don’t think non-felons do a great job either. Partly because of the layers of insulation between a voter and any policy.
Currently, “citizen” has a pretty expansive definition, and those who are governed without it are the exception rather than the rule. Children are the biggest one, restricted under the same strict scrutiny that we apply to all the other ways we don’t let them consent. Immigrants are the other big contingent; I don’t really have a problem with requiring their submission to government. I consider it another prerequisite to actually naturalizing and getting the full rights.
Is this a reasonable expectation? It strikes me as perverse to have “...and permanent suspension of your voting rights” silently tacked on to all sentences in states with such laws. When sentencing guidelines are set, I don’t think voting rights get much consideration compared to the deprivation of physical liberty. In that sense, completing the prison time would be reasonably interpreted as paying the debt.
I would prefer to have slightly longer sentences in exchange for removing this afterthought of an indefinite punishment.
Maine and Vermont let people vote from prison. Do you have any evidence that this leads to bad policies being implemented?
Maine and Vermont have certain other characteristics that result in them being pleasant places.
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Murderers wouldn't vote to make murder legal, because they know very well that they could be the victim of murder by someone else. (They might vote to make murder legal only if done by themselves and not by anyone else, but laws like that aren't on the table.) And if a crime is victimless, I'd be fine with letting criminals vote to legalize it. There may be edge cases (a vagrant who doesn't own property may want to make sleeping on someone's property legal) but I doubt that such things would be seriously proposed as laws anyway.
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