Every year, there is a celebration of the 1960s voting rights movement that passed the Voting Rights Act, subsequently weakened by right-wingers on the Supreme Court. Nowadays there is a campaign for voting rights for former prisoners, and a campaign to inform many current prisoners that they are entitled to vote from prison.

The challenge of rehabilitating imprisoned criminals is to give them a stake in their community. Voting will surely help.

One of the advantages for a rural area in having a prison is that the prisoners are counted as part of its population. Right-wingers might be less eager for private prisons if the prisoners could outvote them.