And people wonder why the Democrats are seen as weak on crime... As Kaus says:

P.S.: The unintended highlight of Unprecedented comes when a Democratic talking head, explaining why the Republicans might try to block felons from voting, says (I'm paraphrasing here) "Ninety-five percent of people coming out of prison vote Democratic." ... Dick Gephardt, there's your campaign slogan! ...

If I get around to it, I'll dig up the actual statistics on Democratic proportion of the prison population. I do know that it's very high, though I'm not sure if it's quite at 95%. Can this be explained by pure h-bd considerations? No - blacks vote monolithically Democratic anyway, but their disproportionate representation in the penal system is not enough to account for this phenomenon. For such a high percentage of *all* prisoners to vote Democrat, prison must act to move whites leftward. Since Democrats are easier on criminals than Republicans, it is of course in their best interests for criminals to vote for lenience - particularly if they intend to offend again. Hey - you know - I just realized that this is a nice zinger to counter people with when they bring up the fact that more educated individuals tend to vote Democratic. Rather than launching into a long diatribe about liberal bias in academia, just hit them with the fact that most prisoners vote Democratic too...