given how little one vote matter, it seems to me that stripping felons of their right to vote is both petty and counterproductive if the point was to reform them into civic minded individuals ?
Also, seems kind of scary that this implies a future where so many people are in prison that their vote could actually tip the balance ?
Creating a class of prison slaves who have no right to vote with no possibility of upward mobility is a feature, not a bug. Add to that the difficulty of obtaining affordable healthcare/tying it to a job, gutting education, making child labor legal, making abortion illegal, etc., etc., and that plan becomes pretty obvious.
It's a recipe for creating monsters similar to how intervention in the middle east created those terrorists and their symbiotic relationship with the military industrial complex. That plan is so ridiculously evil and doomed to fail that I can't help but think there's some second order effect that they're going for here.
The monsters aren't the ones being created, the monsters are the ones creating those circumstances to begin with.
I know you didn't mean anything by it, but that shift in focus is really important to point out, because those same people rely on you and me to see the poor people who's lives they destroyed as the problem, instead of whose who really are.
None of that changes the fact that it is the system that creates that kind of behaviour by encouraging and rewarding selfishness, greed, hate, and doing whatever it takes to "succeed".
I'm not denying that there are horrible people out there (I've been victim to a few personally), or that they shouldn't be held responsible for individual actions if they harm others (they should), but in almost all cases you can't blame them for turning out that way (again, not excusing any harm they go on to cause to others) when you look at the circumstances they need to exist in. Circumstances designed by a handful of people reaping unfathomable benefits.
So I'd much sooner point my finger at those who are actually to blame, instead of at those who are the fucked up products of their system, because one of those not only creates infinitely more damage than the other, but also it's only that same group that have the power to do anything to stop it.