It would be nice to think so, but if I recall correctly one of the points made in The New Jim Crow is that incarceration has been increasing for ten years while crime was falling.

I don’t disagree, but this is the way tthings are going, and I don’t see any constituency willing to actually lobby for the rights of ‘criminals’. So best thing we can do is encourage a norm in favour of lying about convictions/jail time etc

When I was recruiting staff in the UK I had an applicant declare their prison history. This was entirely voluntary on their part, I would have thought, and I was surprised they bothered, and it struck me as very sad that they should have to declare it at all. How can this not lead to discrimination against past prisoners?

Australia allows prisoners to vote if they are serving less than 3 years, and those in for longer than 3 years regain the right upon release.

So yeah, you could lie. But it’s clear they’re discincentivizing applications to the university, presumably under the guise of keeping the campus safe.

They want a police spec or just for you to declare whether you do/dont have a record? If the second you just lie. Theyre not going to check

No. No, they’re not.

The incarcerated population is known to some people, though: the upstate villages love the free labor and job opportunities for native sons & daughters. Plus, there always seem to be attempts to use prisoners in election district chess, not unlike the Three Fifths Compromise of 1787.

When the prison first opened, back in 1929-30, the state loved to report that the citizens of the town were thrilled, and were bringing books and all kinds of goodies to the new campers in their midst. Plus, the original design of the surrounding wall had it largely open in the front, giving the illusion of honesty and openness. That didn’t last long.

One more thing: teaching “The Cask of Amontillado” there is a trip.

Here’s what I wrote:

“In 2008, just over 1% of the US adult population was in prison or jail – over 2.3 million people. Approximately 7% of them were women. That is, roughly 1.9% of adult men are incarcerated; and roughly 0.14% of adult women are incarcerated. …what happens if you add estimated results for prisoners to the survey results – that is, you increase the percentage of men who are “not too happy” by about 1.9% and increase the percentage of women who are “not too happy” by about 0.14? As I read the graph reproduced in the post, the difference in the “not too happy” lines between men and women is less than 1%, so if prisoners were included the men’s line would be higher than the women’s line.”

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1456

“As of 2011, only two states, Kentucky and Virginia, continue to impose a lifelong denial of the right to vote to all citizens with a felony record, absent some extraordinary intervention by the Governor or state legislature. However, in Kentucky, a felon’s rights can now be restored after the completion of a restoration process to regain civil rights. In 2007, Florida moved to restore voting rights to convicted felons. In March 2011, however, Republican Governor Rick Scott reversed the 2007 reforms, making Florida the state with the most punitive law in terms of disenfranchising citizens with past felony convictions. In July 2005, Democratic Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack issued an executive order restoring the right to vote for all persons who have completed supervision. On October 31, 2005, Iowa’s Supreme Court upheld mass re-enfranchisement of ex-convicts. Nine other states disenfranchise felons for various lengths of time following their conviction. Except Maine and Vermont, every state prohibits felons from voting while in prison.

Unlike most other laws that burden the right of citizens to vote based on some form of social status, felony disenfranchisement laws have been held to be constitutional. In Richardson v. Ramirez, the United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of felon disenfranchisement statutes, finding that the practice did not deny equal protection to disenfranchised voters. The Court looked to Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which proclaims that States which deny the vote to male citizens, except on the basis of ‘participation of rebellion, or other crime,’ will suffer a reduction in representation. Based on this language, the Court found that this amounted to an ‘affirmative sanction’ of the practice of felon disenfranchisement, and the 14th Amendment could not prohibit in one section that which is expressly authorized in another. However, many critics argue that Section 2 of the 14th Amendment merely allows, but does not represent an endorsement of, felony disenfranchisement statutes as constitutional in light of the equal protection clause and is limited only to the issue of reduced representation. The Court did rule, however, in Hunter v. Underwood 471 U.S. 222, 232 (1985) that a state’s felony disenfranchisement provision will violate Equal Protection if it can be demonstrated that the provision, as enacted, had ‘both [an] impermissible racial motivation and racially discriminatory impact.’ A felony disenfranchisement law, which on its face is indiscriminate in nature, cannot be invalidated by the Supreme Court unless its enforcement is proven to racially discriminate and to have been enacted with racially discriminatory animus.

Currently, over 5.3 million people in the United States are denied the right to vote because of felony disenfranchisement.”

To keep up-to-date on this topic, one can consult The Sentencing Project: http://www.sentencingproject.org/template/page.cfm?id=133

My bibliography and links on “punishment and prison” may interest those wanting to do some further reading and research: http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2012/11/toward-teaching-prison-lawand-a-bibliography-on-punishment-prison–1.html