While other political forces support the mandatory sentences - most notably the powerful local prosecutors - prison rights advocates have recently begun to argue that prison district politicians are more concerned about keeping the prisons full than about crime. The idea of counting inmates as voters in the counties that imprison them is particularly repulsive given that inmates are nearly always stripped of the right to vote. The practice recalls the early United States under slavery, when slaves were barred from voting but counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of apportioning representation in Congress.
Any organization that would champion such tactics must be relegated to the ash heap of history, by the view of any decent person.
The Republican Party has become something truly repugnant to American sensibilities.
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