> Does serving time really mean you should not get the same say in leaders as everyone else?
It's worse than that. It's the erasure of a check against bad laws. If you pass bad laws that destroy communities by bringing about mass incarceration, the obvious thing to happen next is that you lose the votes of all the people whose lives you've destroyed. Except that you took their votes away too.
For an example of the rot, see Florida: 10% of voting-age citizens have had their vote stolen by the local government. [0] A 2019 referendum to abolish felony disenfranchisement passed with huge margins [1], but then the Republicans passed a new "pay to vote" law, saying it wasn't enough to serve time, but people also had to pay significant fines.
It's worse than that. It's the erasure of a check against bad laws. If you pass bad laws that destroy communities by bringing about mass incarceration, the obvious thing to happen next is that you lose the votes of all the people whose lives you've destroyed. Except that you took their votes away too.