Essay On Should Felons Be Allowed To Vote

Today we live in a society where people are taught that it is acceptable to revoke the born given right of voting. People should be allowed to vote under any circumstances no matter what they have done in the past, this includes felons and ex felons. Assume an american man was convicted of a common assault charge at the age of eighteen and convicted of a felony. Twenty years later the same man is still not allowed to vote because of his ignorance in the past. There is not a person in this world who would like to be defined by their past in such a way. There are many reasons as to why felons and ex felons should be allowed to vote. 5.85 million people that are not able to vote due to disenfranchisement laws in america. The reasons ex felons

There is not a person in this world that can be defined as perfect, many of us often make mistakes everyday. When a person does mess up or do something wrong we often hope that there will be another chance to do right and fix what we have done wrong in the past. Second chances can take the worst of people and turn them into the great law abiding citizens that every country needs. Giving ex felons second chances should be a slow process with small steps leading to being a normal citizen again and the first step would be them regaining their voting rights back. Convicted ex felons are just as much as american citizens as anybody else a person may know. Ex felons having their voting rights cannot personally harm anybody. Their vote is one vote against the other millions of the American population, restoration of ex felon voting rights is not going to make anything any worse for anybody. They just deserve the same voting rights as anybody else in the country. The only way to show that is to give the felons a second chance, everybody else in a functioning society receives second chances, so why are ex felons confined to one single chance? This shows inequality in our justice system and that is not the proper way to reintroduce ex felons into a normal functioning society. “If we thought criminals could never be reformed, we wouldn’t let them out of prison in the first place”

As a felon, coming out of prison all you know is how to live in prison, many are unsure how to go back into a normal functioning society and move along productively. Restoring, but also limiting their rights is a small way to show them that they are equal to all the others in society and keeps them from feeling like outcasts and the social pariahs that this world makes them out to be. Felons and Ex felons are equal to any other american citizen, their only difference is the ex felons have made mistakes in their past that have negatively affected them and their lives. However, mistakes made from the past should not affect people 's later lives in such a way that it can keep people from the obtaining the most basic of rights, this includes voting. Restoring the voting rights of ex felons would help them learn the value of the justice system and the law to strengthen their participation in average life practices. ”Even prisoners would learn to respect the law and contribute to the ‘common good’ with voting rights, according to sociologists Jeff Manza of Northwestern University and Christopher Uggen of the University of