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I write in favor of letting criminals vote. The main argument is that gatekeeping the franchise is not easy and requires a lot of state capacity to securely enforce it. Most of the world lets current and former criminals vote, and I generally don't find arguments to restrict it to be very convincing:
Beyond whether or not disenfranchisement is the right thing to do, there's also the question of implementation:
And beyond implementation by the state, there's also the question of how normal people are expected to navigate the cobwebs:
And finally:
I largely agree with your overall point, but I want to have a stab at this. I assume it's rhetorical, but obviously, for the lay people: this is the whole point of law in the first place. Honest free men can't be coerced as easily as criminals can. When everything is potentially criminal, government has achieved normality and can focus on fighting over who gets to selectively enforce which laws. This is why we have a legal profession, because if laws were easy enough for the people who are supposed to be following them to understand, it wouldn't be necessary.
This quote of yours is damning, and true, but it's true of every law. It's a fully generalizable argument, because law is designed, intended and implemented to be impenetrable and to criminalize as much as possible.
I don't disagree that this is a risk, but I would pushback on how generalizable it is. Almost all my criminal caseload involves acts that are unambiguously wrong (dude stabs a guy, man shoots a gun, woman shoplifts, etc.) where the accused is not at all surprised that they're being charged with a crime. Granted, edge cases exist (esp. self-defense) but I don't think every law can be accused of being impenetrable to the common person.
If everything were in fact potentially criminal, I don't think you'd be able to judge the effects of that by surveying your caseload, or even all the caseloads in the country. Arcane self-defense laws, for example, probably have a chilling effect. Someone might avoid moving to a rough neighborhood for fear that they can't defend themselves reasonably, or decide against buying a gun for self-defense for fear of the consequences of using it, or hesitate to shoot an armed burglar or robber for fear of going to prison. So the rough neighborhood gets rougher because upstanding citizens avoid it, and the burglary victim is harmed financially or even physically because of their inability to trust that the law would be on their side. And you'd never hear about it.
If "rough neighborhood" means a rough part of a generally functioning city, then the unanimous view of people-who-are-not-Americans is that cleaning it up is a job for the police, not for armed gentrifiers. If the neighborhood is so bad that even the police won't go there then
You are probably in Sweden and your problem is immigration policy (and housing policy as well, as far as I can see), not self defense law
Sane people are not going to move into the neighborhood because "It is okay if I get mugged, the law lets me defend myself."
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