Everyone loves a scarlet letter.
I'm a big fan of the notion of letting people pay their "debt to society" and calling it square. Seems to me that unless you want to make a person a ward of the state for life, that's the only rational way to do it.
This question also dovetails with the never-ending trend of federalizing crimes. It takes a lot less ambition to become a felon today than it did forty years ago. At the rate we're going, in another forty years we'll have felony 2nd offense littering and jaywalking charges. Tough on crime is a ratchet.
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