Cruel to Be Kind
The strings, conditions, provisos, clawbacks, gotchas, and other punitive ornaments that lawmakers hang on laws just to screw with those who can't fight back
Until lawmakers force homeowners to pee in a cup on account of claiming the mortgage interest deduction...
...and compel the executives at Carrier/UTC, Amazon, Walmart, and at other corporations to offer up hair strands at nearby testing labs as a condition of claiming their corporate welfare...
...and affix sweat patches on every cell phone user on a monthly basis as a prerequisite to communicating the following month in the 824-849 and 869-894 MHz spectrum range that the government sets aside for their use without interference...
...and notify everyone who receives mail service that daily delivery is conditioned on their completion of an official annual survey under penalty of perjury as to whether the things they do in private violate controlled substance laws or anything else the government might be curious about...
...then the push to make welfare recipients jump through similar hoops as a condition of receiving government benefits will always be about jerking people around and attacking their dignity just because they have no political clout to fight back.
If the government can deny you the right to vote for having managed to incarcerate you, then you’re a political prisoner.
It “feels” like the right way to set policy solely because the directly impacted people cannot fight back.
One of the more notorious “we’ve gotta be cruel to be kind” initiatives - that’s popular on both sides of the aisle - is pegging the Child Tax Credit to reported earnings. Not only do they insist that households generate income to qualify (and, at that, they only recognize the kinds of income that’s reportable on W-2 and 1099 forms), they increase the credit for people who earn more, such that those who least need the credit receive more credit than others. The fiscal quid pro quo of the Child Tax Credit is that it’s extended in return to families for provisioning a prospective earner to the economy - yet the politicians only want to relinquish money if there are strings attached, reducing the personal agency of those who are raising children simply because they can get away with being cruel whenever a law purports to be kind.
Lawmakers can’t help but tack on various indignities to policies that rectify injustices or extend relief to citizens, but they especially love to tack on indignities when they’re being cruel to begin with.
One of the shrewdest forms of gratuitous bullying that lawmakers engage in is the revocation or suspension of the right to vote as a knock-on penalty for people who commit crimes. If the government can deny you the right to vote for having managed to incarcerate you, then you’re a political prisoner.
Amnesty International defines “political prisoner” as
"one who is detained for his or her beliefs, color, sex, ethnic origin, language, or religious creed, regardless of whether the individual has advocated the use of violence and includes those detained without trial or prosecuted as a form of persecution."
Whatever room there is for a good faith debate as to whether America’s carceral state is built around the goal of subjugating Black people and the very poorest of people, nearly every state confesses to this design by revoking or suspending the voting rights of the people they incarcerate.
Maine and Vermont, the two exceptions that do not deny the vote to their inmates, underscore the racism and classism of attaching voting restrictions to criminal sentences, as those two states are America’s two “whitest” states - preserving votes for their homogenously white voter base. Again, they’re not “among” the whitest states. They are #1 (Vermont at 95.6%) and #2 (Maine at 95.4%). In the 48 states that have more melanin per capita, lawmakers have decided to tag on various voting restrictions as the consequence of criminal convictions.
Why? Because they can get away with screwing over people who have no power or clout.
One may argue, case-by-case, that America’s penitentiaries, prisons and work farms are filled with people detained for other specific reasons, but - viewed holistically - they are filled with people who have been targeted on the grounds spelled out by Amnesty International as qualifying our nation’s imprisoned population as “political prisoners.”
[O]ur prison systems would look very different - and be far less sprawling and populous - if the right to vote could not be withdrawn by the state….
The easiest people for politician to punch are those who are subject to the law with no democratic power to hold the politician to account. That’s why being incarcerated means suffering an inexhaustible litany of indignities, from costly privatized mail systems, to extortionate phone service, price gouging for soap and hygiene supplies, and - well, I did say the list is inexhaustible.
I may be going out on the shortest of limbs in speculating that our prison systems would look very different - and be far less sprawling and populous - if the right to vote could not be withdrawn by the state for those it puts behind bars. Indeed, our communities would be transformed by a criminal justice system that was accountable to all, not just to those whose neighborhoods are not over-policed and who feel safe from police harassment.
An irrevocable right to vote is not as far-fetched as it may sound to the ears of those who have spent their lives internalizing the concept that felons should not be allowed to vote. Consider, if you will, how the right to consume alcohol is automatically and irreversibly granted to persons who reach majority age, yet the right to vote requires extra effort and is subject to revocation.
That’s right: we live in a nation where the right to consume alcohol is more sacred and inviolable than the right to vote. The reasons for this (and for other gratuitously-administered government-prescribed indignities) are obvious to all who are open to the reality that America does not come close to delivering on its lyrical promise to be the land of the free.
In some better world, our lawmakers would exercise whatever restraint is needed to stop them from pursuing the shiny object of enacting gratuitously cruel measures that are untethered from any serious policy considerations. Until then, I’ll distract myself imagining all the travesties that should befall them, by law, if they should fail to win a bid for re-election.