I understand you cripple. I’m not a felon, but in the course of my professional career, I have dealt with them, and even worked for one. People who have served their time (whether it be in actual prison or not), should not continue to pay for the rest of their lives. If the crime is rape or murder, sure. But: A) Very few crimes should be felonies, and B) No one but the most heinous of crimes should even be in prison.
Prison is a places that teaches people who have made mistakes (It IS IMPOSSIBLE not to regularly commit some crime or another, which is one reason of what the 5th amendment is actually for, protecting you from hanging yourself in the event unknowingly committed one) how to become real criminal, and milk them for money. The fact is that once you commit a crime, you are therefore generally excluded from anything BUT committing more crimes, because no one will hire you, even if the crime had nothing to do with your line of work. The government has made it night unto impossible to be in business for yourself (along with socialists/crony capitalism), until you have no choice but to go back to (or start, more often) something shady. Then wham, you’re a life time criminal and cash machine (from taxpayers), for the prison state.
The same people that want to lock people up, are generally the same people who make horrible parents. The ones that rather than teach their children natural consequences (Ie, you break something, you clean it up/pay for it, etc.; you take something, you pay it back), they try to be authoritarian dictators. I see it over and over, and it really saddens me. There’s a proper midpoint in between total control (what prison is), and no control (anarchy), and people seem to want to think it has to be one or the other. It doesn’t, and it’s not supposed to be. God didn’t intend for people to be unable to make any choices after making a bad one. He intended for people to grow from mistakes (repent), or in very few cases, to die (as in murder). I’m sick of people playing God. I’m also grateful that one day we’ll be out of the oppression that people inflict upon one another for political and personal gain.
I can think of a gentleman -- two, actually -- who are convicted felons that I WOULD TRUST WITH MY LIFE, and whose values, politics, and morals I respect ten times more that several self-described "conservative Christians" who come to mind.