The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

With peculiarly ironic timing, the ruling came down the same week the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations issued a highly critical report about how the United States treats prisoners and ex-prisoners. Among its recommendations was one urging the U.S. to find legislative ways to re-enfranchise the millions of people who, after they come out of prison, still remain voteless.

The ricochet effects of America's overuse of incarceration, and the casual way in which courts have handed out felony convictions since the 1970s, has long fascinated me. The ways in which bulking up the scale of the country's criminal justice system (five times as many people are incarcerated today as in 1973) have impacted the broader economy and politics of the country seem to me a particularly strange embodiment of chaos theory: arrest more people on drug charges, for example, put more members of the country's underclasses behind bars, and, without realizing it, you can pretty dramatically alter the underlying political equilibrium.

One of the core reasons for this is in most states people with felony convictions face at least a temporary removal of their voting rights; and in several states, mainly concentrated in the South, that loss is more or less permanent. In some parts of the country, upwards of 7 percent of the adult population is legally prohibited from voting, sitting on juries or running for public office.

In the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, I traversed the country, from west to east, chronicling the emergence of mass disenfranchisement and the challenge this epidemic of vote-removal poses to our sense of democratic identity. In states like Alabama and Kentucky, I encountered people convicted of minor drug offenses in their teens or early twenties who, decades later, couldn't even vote for the school board that ran their children's schools; I talked with people who told me not being able to vote made them feel "humiliated," "shamed," like exiles removed from their communities. On the flip side of this, I spoke with people who said being able to vote would engender in them a sense of "awe," and reconnect them with their communities in a deeply personal way. I talked with one man in Virginia, who had a drug conviction dating back to the 1980s. He had filing paperwork for more than a decade, trying to persuade the responsible government agencies to restore his voting rights.

No other country that defines itself as a democracy systematically strips the right to vote from a significant percentage of its adult citizen population. Many of America's closest allies, including Israel, South Africa and Germany, allow people to vote even when they are in prison. Most others restore the right to vote once people emerge from prison.

For too long in America complicated criminal justice policies have been held hostage to sound-bite politics. Yet often what makes a good headline doesn't make for the best long-term policy. It might sound good to deprive parolees, probationers and even ex-felons who haven't been involved in the criminal justice system in decades, of the right to vote. It might seem tough and hard and no-nonsense. But does it make society safer? Does cutting a one-time felon's ties to the rituals of community life help prevent crime, or does it serve mainly to alienate these people, to push them ever further outside the mainstream, perhaps eventually making them more likely to commit new crimes? Does shrinking the franchise make the country fairer and more democratic? Or does it mainly serve to further atomize an already cynical electorate, and to reduce the political clout not only of the affected individuals but also of the broader, often low-income and minority, communities in which they live?

If Israel and South Africa can move away from felon disenfranchisement, surely it's time the United States, and state legislators in Colorado and elsewhere, take this bull by the horns and wrestle into place fairer, more modern laws. Not to do so will, ultimately, as the United Nations report implies, only reduce the standing of our democracy in the eyes of the world.

Sasha Abramsky is a senior fellow at Demos, a New York City-based nonpartisan public policy institute.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/speak_out/article/0,2777,DRMN_23970_4892362,00.html

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