What is your stand on felony voting rights?

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I have just seen that the State of Florida has passed an amendment to its constitution (via a public vote) to repeal its ban on people convicted of an offence (other than murder or a sex crime) being able to vote. I find it amazing that this bar was ever there in the first place. I gather that across much of the United States, if you are sent to jail for virtually any crime and serve your sentence, you are still not allowed to vote in elections - and this bar is often a lifetime ban. So - in America - you pay the price for your crime by serving time, but you can never get back to where you started as a citizen of your country and are always reminded of your past misdeeds by watching everyone else exercise the democratic rights that are no longer open to you. In other words - fall from grace just once and your sentence lasts for the rest of your life. Another aspect of this injustice is that black people in America form a disproportionate segment of the prison population. That is not necessarily because black people commit more crimes, but because black people are more often targeted for arrest and juries of white people tend to convict black people more readily than they do white people - that may sound like a racist statement, but the statistics back it up. That means that a disproportionate number of black people in America are banned from voting for life - more than 400,000 in Florida alone before Amendment 4 was carried. That also means that there is a political impetus at work - put more black people in jail and you can change the political landscape for decades to come. I find all this to be just terrible, and I hope that other states will follow Florida's example and do something to right this wrong. For the record, in the UK you lose the right to vote when you are actually in jail but regain it on release. There are currently moves afoot to give some prisoners the right to vote even when they are in jail - these would be people convicted of relatively minor offences. This strikes me as a far more civilized state of affairs than what currently applies in most of the United States.