Home Work Criminal Science

Student Identification Number AC1503104

Course Number and Title Introduction to Criminal Justice

Assignment 8_08 Part A

Date 07/10/2015

1. Describe the loss of the right to vote for inmates who are incarcerated.

Prisoners are citizens too. They may have committed a felony, but they are still citizens of their home country. Some people think prisoners should not have the right to vote, but many others think they should. About two million people in U.S. are in prison. All those people do not get to cast a vote in the election. They are not able to decide who runs the country they live in. Imagine not being able to have a say in our country. We are a democracy, which means everyone has the right to vote in our government. Prisoners should be allowed to vote because they still are citizens and still have rights.

Prisoners should be able to vote and influence the outcome of an election . If all the prisoners were allowed to vote it may have an impact on the election. Prisoners want the chance to vote. As of February 2011 the United States was in the lead of number of prisoners with 2,019,234. Prisoners do not have a say in the government. In New York people who are on parole cannot vote. As of 2004 thirty-five states forbid people who have just been released from prison to vote.

In the constitution it states everyone is given the right to vote. Amendment 15 is the voting rights act. In the first section of this amendment, it states the right to vote cannot be taken away from people based on their color, race, or what has happened previously in their life. That amendment is not being applied to the rights of prisoners. Only two states, Vermont and Maine, let everyone vote without ever stripping away rights (Robin Coe, Prisoners Voting Rights ehow.com). In Vermont the voting laws are you have to be a citizen of the United States, a resident of Vermont, has taken voters oath, and 18 years or older to vote, this means that prisoners can vote there. In the second section it states that congress is supposed to enforce the first one. In 47 states prisoners cannot vote; in Maine incarcerated person is allowed to vote. Congress has only protected this amendment in two states.

We are a democracy. In a democracy everyone has a say in the government. The voting rules are different for prisoners in each state. In some states prisoners voting rights have to be restored. In South Dakota felons must serve their full term of incarceration, parole, or probation before they are allowed to register to vote. In Washington, felons have to wait to be off parole to be able to vote. In some states, prisoners cannot get their voting rights back once they have left prison if they have committed a very serious crime. In Alabama, most felons have to apply to get their voting rights back, but if the felon committed a very serious crime like a murder, or treason they cannot get their rights back. In Delaware no matter what crime a felon may have committed they have to wait five years before they can vote, but if they committed murder, manslaughter, or abuse they have their voting rights permanently taken away. In Mississippi, when felons commit murder, theft, arson, bribery, carjacking and more they are banned from voting , but they can go to their state representative and convince him/her why they should be able to vote. Taking away prisoners voting rights even after they have been released is unfair. Two million people are in prison. That’s a lot of people who cannot have a say, plus all the felons that have been released but are not able to vote. Those people cannot choose who runs their government.

Prisoners should be able to vote because they are citizens and they do have an influence on who would be elected. Those 2 million people would make a difference. When the election comes up their voting could make a difference in who gets elected. We are a democracy. Everyone has a say in government. Just because they have committed a crime does not mean their voting rights should be taken away.

2. Is race is an underlying issue in this process? Provide one (1) supporting fact to justify your response.

Adults are often better at recognizing own-race than other-race faces. Unlike previous studies that reported an own-race advantage after administering a single test of either holistic processing or of featural and relational processing, we used a cross-over design and multiple tasks to assess differential processing of faces from a familiar race versus a less familiar race. Caucasian and Chinese adults performed for tasks, each with Caucasian and Chinese faces. Two tasks measured holistic processing: the composite face task and the part/whole task. Both tasks indicated holistic processing of own-race and other-race faces that did not differ in degree. Two tasks measured featural and relational processing: The Jane/Ling task, in which same/different judgments' were made about face pairs that differed in features of their spacing, and the scrambled/blurred task, in which test faces were scrambled (isolates memory for components) or blurred (isolates memory for relations). Both tasks provided evidence of an own-race advantage in both featural and relational

Processing. I conclude that even when adults process other race faces holistically, other manifestations of an own-race advantage remain.

3. Do you believe that inmates should have the right to vote? Provide one (1) supporting fact to justify your position.

They're still citizens. With ever increasing punitive sentences, often times for non violent crimes, it's completely reprehensible to deny almost 2.5 MILLION people their right to vote. These people deserve a voice in the politics that directly effect them as American citizens. We need to understand that anyone can end up in jail with over 600,000 ways to become a felon in America. We are all felons, everyone reading this, you, me, stop with the the notion that all people in prison are 'terrible' or deserve to be there. We live in a police state, voting is one of our only real outlets to attempt to change it.