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Is letting prisoners vote a "dangerous idea"?

By Douglas A. Berman

The question in the title of this post is prompted by this new entry at the website Big Think.  The entry is titled "Let Prisoners Vote," which is part of their "Dangerous Ideas" series, which says that "August is the month of thinking dangerously: one new radical idea a day."  Here is part of the entry: There are currently 2.3 million disenfranchised inmates in the United States: 1.5 million are serving prison sentences of over a year; 800,000 are locked in local jails serving sentences of a year or less; and roughly 100,000 still have the right to vote, but have not made bail and cannot make it the polls while awaiting sentencing. According to a report co-published by Human Rights Watch and The Sentencing Project, a national organization working for a fair and effective criminal justice system, disenfranchisement laws are "a vestige of medieval times when offenders were banished from the community and suffered 'civil death...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on August 18, 2010 (boomark / email).