Public officials should compensate the victims of wrongful conviction and enforcement. The same considerations in favor of compensating people for wrongful conviction and enforcement in other cases support officials’ payment of reparations to the victims of unjust enforcement practices related to the drug war. First, we defend the claim that people who are convicted and incarcerated because of an unjust law are wrongfully convicted. Although their convictions do not currently qualify as wrongful convictions in the legal sense, we argue that (...) the same reasons for legally recognizing other wrongful convictions support conceiving of these cases as wrongful convictions. If so, then people who suffered wrongful convictions associated with unjust laws, like others who were wrongfully convicted, are entitled to compensation and reparation. We then argue that America’s drug laws are unjust laws. Therefore, people who were convicted of nonviolent drug offenses are entitled to compensation. (shrink)

This paper discusses an argument in defense of felon disenfranchisement originally proposed by Andrew Altman, which states that as a matter of democratic self-determination, members of a legitimate democratic community have a collective right to decide whether to disenfranchise felons. Although this argument—which is here referred to as the argument from democratic self-determination—is held to justify policies that are significantly broader in scope than many critics of existing disenfranchisement practices would allow for, it has received little attention from philosophers and (...) political theorists. One exception is Claudio López-Guerra, who recently raised several objections to the argument. In this paper, I argue that the argument from democratic self-determination can avoid López-Guerra’s objections. In responding to these, I explicate how and when it can be permissible for a legitimate democratic community to disenfranchise felons. I propose that this is the case only if the disenfranchisement of felons is not intended as a punishment, but as a way to express the view about citizenship one endorses as a democratic collective. I also discuss the implications of the argument in terms of offender reintegration. (shrink)