How significantly does this restriction of citizenship prevent prisoners who are released from participating in a democratic society?
The effects of imprisonment are quite profound. In a legal sense, there is a literal erosion of citizenship because the rights you have as an ex-felon are more limited than the rights of someone who has never been in prison. In a more general sense, you also suffer the social effects of imprisonment. You’re at higher risk of unemployment, you earn less, you’re more likely to experience divorce or separation if you are married. If you’re not married, you’re less likely to become so. The quality of life that you can expect as a full member of society is different from that of someone who has never been imprisoned. What about the effect of mass imprisonment on crime rates? Recently, there have been a number of influential studies that argue that the growth in the penal system throughout the 1990s helps to explain a large part of the substantial drop in crime in the 1990s. I went back and closely looked at the data; I estimated that the growth in imprisonment during the 1990s only explaine
