It may be true, as prison abolitionists suggest, that the country can reduce the need for prisons and punishment by working to alleviate the social ills that give birth to crime, and that’s a worthy goal. But it is also true that there are always going to be a few people in our world who are simply mean, malicious, selfish, and violent. There will always be murders, rapes, and assaults — crimes that injure and kill people, altering and ending countless lives.

Some of the people who commit those crimes can be rehabilitated, and should be restored to full rights when they rejoin the general public. But some — Roof, for example, but also the Stoneman Douglas school shooter in Florida and the Boston Marathon bombers, all of whom survived their crimes and live now behind bars — commit evil on such a scale that they cannot possibly be allowed to fully participate in society. Those people — and they are a small minority of those who actually end up in prison — shouldn’t get to vote.

Sometimes, the social contract is so badly ruptured that it cannot be repaired.