The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog: Disenfranchisement/Census Archives

July 03, 2008

MI: people with felony convictions and homeless people eligible to vote

Ex-felons, homeless are part of state voting process

By Eric T. Campbell
The Michigan Citizen

DETROIT — The 2008 primary race for the highest office in the nation has brought millions of new voters to the polls. With the end of the primary season and the beginning of the general election, many more will finally become active participants. But what about access to the polls for those whom society has attempted to marginalize?

The purging of Florida citizens, ex-felons and non-felons alike, from voter rolls in 2000 is just one example of a state apparatus intentionally eliminating minorities from the election process. In addition, new photo ID laws popping up around the country create more barriers to voter participation.

The 2004 presidential election in the U.S. resulted in numerous cases of alleged election fraud and a lack of sufficient numbers of voting machines.

In Michigan, the homeless and ex-felons are legally entitled to vote.

According to statistics obtained from the U.S. Justice Department by the Sentencing Project, 13% of Black men are unable to vote in America due to felony conviction laws. Like many states, ex-felons in Michigan keep their right to vote once they’ve served the community. Their voting status remains exactly the same as it was before a felony conviction.

However, according to Marc Mauer, executive director for the Washington D.C. based Sentencing Project, Corrections Departments in most states don’t go far enough in getting the word out to prisoners.

“It’s the lack of information,” Mauer told the Michigan Citizen. “There’s no systematic means by which they are informed of their right to vote.”

Mauer says many parolees incorrectly believe that they are unable to vote—an opinion often substantiated by misinformed election officials. He sites a recent 10 state survey in which 31% of local election officials misunderstood voting laws for ex-felons.

Kwasi Akwamu, from Helping Our Prisoners Elevate (H.O.P.E.), a Detroit prisoner advocacy group, says that prisoners often come out with the intention of addressing a system that unjustly led to their incarceration.

“Most people that go to prison gain a greater awareness,” Akwamu said. “We encourage ex-prisoners to vote—to become part of that process and change those harsh policies.”

Akwamu also says that one problem ex-prisoners often experience is maintaining the proper ID.

Ken Silfven, of the Michigan Secretary of State’s office, says that the Department of Corrections in Michigan is spending more time with ID issues for outgoing prisoners.

“We’re involved in the prison reentry program initiative,” Silfven told the Michigan Citizen, “with one goal being to get prisoners proper identification once released.”

Silfven talked about a new Secretary of State mobile office, which is targeting hard to reach populations like veterans, the elderly and the homeless.

Cheryl P. Johnson of the Coalition On Temporary Shelter told the Michigan Citizen that the 13,000 homeless in Detroit also have the opportunity to vote through absentee ballots.

COTS has four locations in the Detroit area which house homeless citizens in transition and permanent residents who may suffer from physical disabilities.

The city clerk’s office has traditionally had a presence at the shelters during elections to register voters and promote awareness, Johnson told the Michigan Citizen.

“We definitely focus on getting people knowledge about their voting rights,” Johnson says.

Johnson also said that local and national candidates have campaigned at temporary and permanent shelters in an effort to address the problem of homelessness and the people that have been victims of it.

“We’ve always had that kind of open door policy to allow nominees to come and speak.”

COTS is located at 26 Peterboro and can be reached at 313-831-3777.
Contact Helping Our Prisoners Elevate at www.hopedetroit.com
http://www.michigancitizen.com/print_this_story.asp?smenu=1&sdetail=6182

Posted by lois at 02:57 PM | Comments (0)

June 30, 2008

2 Editorials on Expanding Democracy & Disenfranchisement

June 30, 2008
Editorial, NY Times
Expanding Democracy in Florida

Among the world’s democracies, the United States is uniquely unforgiving in denying ex-offenders the right to vote. Nowhere is the problem worse than in Florida, where criminal justice experts estimate that as many as 950,000 felons are barred from the voting booth.

Last year, Gov. Charlie Crist pushed through new rules that made it easier for some ex-offenders to become full citizens and helped restore voting rights to more than 100,000 former prisoners. But this is well short of what’s needed — a complete overhaul of a wildly illogical system.

In most states, inmates win back their voting rights as soon as they are released from prison or when they complete parole or probation. One big reason that does not happen in Florida is that state law requires felons to first make restitution to their victims. And until their voting rights are restored, former prisoners are barred from scores of state-regulated occupations for which the restoration of voting rights is listed as a condition of employment.

Quite apart from the fact that it is undemocratic to bar people from the voting booth because they owe money, the system is transparently counterproductive since it prevents people from landing the jobs they will need to make restitution. Denying ex-offenders a chance to make an honest living is a sure way to drive them back to jail.

The system also requires extensive and unnecessary background checks before voting rights can be restored for some applicants, making it hard to reduce the backlog. Florida could clear up that backlog in a hurry, treat all ex-offenders fairly and enhance democracy by automatically restoring voting rights to inmates who have completed their sentences.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/opinion/30mon3.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

GLOBE EDITORIAL
Out of jail, on the rolls

June 24, 2008

VOTING IS a fundamental right, not a privilege for the virtuous. And yet 10 states permanently restrict the voting rights of some or all felons, and 25 more deny the franchise to those out on parole, according to a compelling new report by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. While these measures might satisfy a desire to punish law-breakers, they also add to the alienation of ex-cons - and are therefore likely to hurt rather than help public safety.

The voting rights of ex-felons are - bizarrely - decided on a state by state basis. Until a ballot question tightened the rules eight years ago, Massachusetts allowed incarcerated prisoners to vote. Even now, the Commonwealth restores prisoners' right to vote upon their release - a practice that the Brennan Center urges more restrictive states to adopt. The center is also touting federal legislation that would guarantee 4 million released prisoners the right to vote at least in federal elections.

Bans on voting by ex-cons bespeak a kind of paranoia - as if politically astute criminals would take control of the government and repeal all the laws. In fact, ex-cons are likely to be disconnected from politics and economic life. Their disenfranchisement also dampens the voting power of African-Americans and other minority communities with high incarceration rates.

The long-term disenfranchisement of ex-cons creates opportunities for mischief. In 2000, Florida denied the vote to innocent people with names similar to those in a national database of felons.

But there are more hopeful signs. In 2006 Rhode Island voted to restore the franchise to prisoners upon their release, and the report points to reforms in Iowa, Maryland, and even Florida. Legislators and voters are realizing that most prisoners eventually get out, and need to find a place in society. Restoring their right to vote can only help.

Posted by lois at 06:22 PM | Comments (0)

June 26, 2008

The Sentencing Project's response to George Will's Column: "More Prisons, Less Crime"

The Sentencing Project
www.sentencingproject.org

Do More Prisoners Equal Less Crime? A Response to George Will

In a recent syndicated column (“More Prisons, Less Crime,” Washington Post, June 22, 2008), commentator George Will argues that the world record incarceration rate in the United States has produced safer streets and has been beneficial in particular to African Americans, who are disproportionately victims of crime. Will’s selective use of data and limited vision provide an inaccurate portrayal of current criminal justice policy and its effects. Following is an assessment of some of the key arguments raised in the column.

“Liberalism likes victimization narratives and the related assumption that individuals are blank slates on which ’society’ writes. Hence liberals locate the cause of crime in flawed social conditions that liberalism supposedly can fix.”

Decades of research documents that people in low-income, minority communities are at greater risk of entering the criminal justice system because of the paucity of prevention programs, early intervention programs, and alternatives to incarceration. While privately run social services programs are widely available in most middle and upper class communities, their limited presence where they are most needed means that the first “intervention” that those less fortunate encounter is often prison.

Evidence-based social programs that address the contributing factors to crime have been demonstrated to be more cost-effective than incarceration. Research shows that quality preschool programs can save the public $17 for each dollar that is invested. Other programs with documented cost-effectiveness include initiatives to improve high school graduation rates and a variety of substance abuse treatment strategies.

“…Obama said that ‘more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities.’ Actually, there are more than twice as many black men ages 18 to 24 in college as there are in jail.”

Will is technically correct that Senator Obama misspoke in his reference to young black men, as opposed to black men of all ages. But current and projected rates of incarceration for black men are indeed dramatic. One of every nine black males in the age group 20-34 is in prison or jail on any given day, and if current trends continue one of every three black males born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime.

“…from 1999 to 2004, violent offenders accounted for all of the increase in the prison population”

Will is both wrong and misleading on this statistic. First, the violent offense proportion of the state prison population increase, 75%, was substantial, but did not account for “all of the increase.” More importantly, the crisis of incarceration in the U.S. did not begin in 1999. In fact, the incarcerated population has been rising at a dramatic rate for more than three decades. The combined prison and jail population has risen by more than 600% since 1972, increasing from 300,000 to 2.3 million today. A longer term view of the rise in the prison and jail population shows that changes in drug policy have been most significant in contributing to this expansion. From 1980 to today, the number of drug offenders in prison and jail has risen by 1100%, from 41,000 to 500,000.

“In the overwhelming majority of cases, prison remains a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending. Absent recidivism or a violent crime, the criminal-justice system will do everything it can to keep you out of the state or federal slammer.”

The unprecedented rise in the prison population described above was brought about primarily as a result of changes in policy, not crime rates. State and federal legislatures passed numerous “tough on crime” laws intended to put more people in prison and keep them there longer than in the past. An analysis of incarceration patterns between 1980 and 2001 by noted criminologists Alfred Blumstein and Allen Beck concluded that fluctuations in crime rates played no role in the 316% growth in imprisonment. The researchers found that the entire growth was related to changes in sentencing policy, with 53% attributable to an increased likelihood of incarceration following an arrest and 47% resulting from increased time served in prison.

“But [Heather] Mac Donald cites studies of charging and sentencing that demonstrate that the reason more blacks are disproportionately in prison, and for longer terms, is not racism but racial differences in patterns of criminal offending.”

While differential crime offending is one contributing factor to racial disparities in prison, a wealth of research documents that it only explains a portion of the patterns in imprisonment. A comprehensive review of research in the field conducted for the National Institute of Justice concluded that "race and ethnicity do play an important role in contemporary sentencing decisions. Black and Hispanic offenders -- and particularly those who are young, male, or unemployed -- are more likely than their white counterparts to be sentenced to prison; in some jurisdictions, they also receive longer sentences...than do similarly situated white offenders."

“As for the charge that the incarceration rate of blacks is substantially explained by more severe federal sentences for crack as opposed to powder-cocaine defendants…[citing Mac Donald] ‘it’s going to take a lot more than 5,000 or so [federal] crack defendants a year to account for the 562,000 black prisoners in state and federal facilities at the end of 2006.’”

The movement to reform federal penalties for crack cocaine offenses is not based on the assumption that these policies represent the entire problem of disparity in the criminal justice system. Instead, as respected organizations including the U.S. Sentencing Commission and the American Bar Association have documented, the crack penalties are both ineffective as drug policy and contribute to unwarranted racial disparities. They are also representative of many of the misguided policies and practices of the “war on drugs,” which has resulted in over-incarceration of low-level offenders and disproportionate targeting of communities of color.

“ . . . 10 years of scholarly studies ‘have shown that states that sent a higher fraction of convicts to prison had lower rates of crime . . . [a] high risk of punishment reduces crime. Deterrence works.’”

The relationship between incarceration and crime is far more complicated than is suggested by this quote. During the 1990s, a time of historic declines in crime, there was no discernible correlation between incarceration rates and criminal offending. Between 1991 and 1998, states with above average increases in the rate of incarceration (72%) experienced a 13% decrease in crime rates. But states with below average increases in the rate of incarceration (30%) actually experienced a greater decline in crime rates, 17%. During this time the notable “tough on crime” state of Texas experienced a 144% rise in incarceration between 1991 and 1998, and its crime rate fell 35%. However, New York’s crime rate declined by a greater extent, 43%, during this period, despite an increase of incarceration of only 24%. New York continues to experience historic lows in crime while its prison population continues to decline, and there is widespread discussion of closing four prisons in the state because of excess capacity.

In truth, imprisonment has only played a limited role in reducing crime. An analysis of the drop in crime during the 1990s estimated that the growth of imprisonment accounted for about one-quarter of the decline in violent crime. Other contributing factors likely included a growing economy, changes in drug market dynamics, strategic policing, and community engagement in crime prevention efforts. While imprisonment may work at some level to reduce crime through deterrence and incapacitation, there is little evidence supporting the deterrent effect of increasingly longer prison sentences. Research suggests that any deterrent effect is more a function of the certainty of punishment, not the severity.

“‘Deterrence works.’ [Quoting Heather MacDonald] It works especially on behalf of blacks, who are disproportionately the victims of crimes by black men.”

While prison has had only a limited impact on crime, it is increasingly resulting in negative consequences for individuals, families, and communities. As a result of mass incarceration there are now 1.5 million children with a parent in prison, including 1 in 14 African American children.

African American communities are also affected by the challenges of reentry for the 700,000 people leaving prison each year. Many persons leaving prison are ill-equipped to handle life on the outside because they have received few services for mental health, substance abuse, education, and vocational skill-building programming while incarcerated.

Upon leaving prison or jail, individuals encounter a tangle of legal restrictions which severely limit their ability to become productive members of society. In addition to longstanding barriers to employment and education, in recent years policymakers have enacted a host of restrictions, many applying solely to drug offenders. These include a federal ban on welfare and food stamps for those with a felony drug conviction, a federal mandate that limits access to public housing, and restrictions on student loans for higher education.

An estimated 5.3 million individuals are unable to vote because of laws that deny this fundamental right to participate in the democratic process to those with felony convictions. These restrictions fall disproportionately on African Americans, with13% of black males currently unable to vote. These policies affect black communities as a whole, whereby even persons who are not disenfranchised experience vote dilution as a result of high rates of legal disenfranchisement in their communities.

Conclusion

Issues of crime and justice are critical ones for all Americans. As such, we need to encourage a national dialogue on promoting safety that assesses the appropriate balance of approaches among prevention, strengthening communities, and criminal justice sanctions. For more than three decades our nation has made unprecedented investments in prison expansion at the expense of other policy options. We now need a national dialogue that is centered on evidence-based research regarding the relative effectiveness of various interventions. Such a dialogue would produce better public safety outcomes for all Americans.

June 28, 2008

Posted by lois at 01:20 PM | Comments (0)

June 01, 2008

VA: Churches add to effort to restore voting rights

Effort seeks to restore felons' voting rights
The local project will involve sermons, distributing information and conducting workshops.
Daily Press, Newport News VA
By DAVID SQUIRES
May 24, 2008

M.V. Cooke realizes that she made her own bed — hard. She didn't realize that she'd have to sleep in it so long — years after she paid for her crime and made peace.

Roderick Hart feels pretty much the same way.

Both plan to be in church Sunday as local pastors spur a grass-roots effort to help nonviolent offenders get voting rights restored in time for the Nov. 4 presidential election. For the next two Sundays, local churches will announce the program, pass out the necessary forms and plan workshops for offenders wanting their voting rights restored.

Cooke, 62, said that would be a big step toward making her whole again after a drug conviction in the 1980s. She has been out of the probation system since 1992.

"I didn't realize I couldn't vote until after I got out," said Cooke, who served 11 months in the Virginia Correctional Center for Women in Goochland. But that was merely one of her problems, she soon learned.

"When you have a felony, you can't get a job, a decent apartment, and you can't vote," said Cooke, who married in 1995 and is now a homeowner.

She didn't want to be photographed for this news story because she feared being ostracized in the community. "We're in a new neighborhood," she said. "None of the people in our church knows."

Cooke has sage advice for anyone thinking of crime to jump-start their lifestyle: "Don't do it," she said. "It's not worth it, and it's wrong."

Cooke, who's retired, said one of her biggest frustrations was a stereotype about black people and jobs.

"People always say that black people don't want to work," she said. "But if you go to a temp place, like Labor Finders, all you see is black people. People want to work, but jobs don't want to hire you because of something in your background."

Hart, 51, of Newport News, can relate: Off probation since 2002 for guns and weapons charges, Hart shows up regularly to find work through a Labor Finders location in Newport News.

Hart, who attends Way of the Cross Living Waters Church in Newport News, didn't know that his right to vote could be restored until recent talk about the local project.

He said he was eager to begin the process because as a convicted felon, "You don't have a say in anything. You have no say whatsoever. ... But one vote can make a difference."

The expedited program doesn't apply to violent and drug-distribution offenders. That process will take at least six months — usually longer — because it's more extensive, says Bernard Henderson, deputy secretary of the commonwealth.

Local churches will help collect applications from nonviolent offenders and send them to Richmond by Aug. 1, so the forms can be processed in time to allow registration for the November election. Registration can take place at least 30 days before the election.

The Rev. Paul Sheppard, pastor of Third Baptist Church in Hampton, is coordinating the effort for the Peninsula Baptist Pastors Council, which has asked local churches to participate. Sheppard said his Sunday sermon would refer to the vote-restoration project.

"I'm going to preach about it this Sunday, then I'm going to reinforce it next Sunday," he said. "Right now, I'm looking at Luke 15 — the reaction of a restoring God."

Applicants for restoration of rights must be residents of Virginia or convicted of a felony in a Virginia, federal or military court. They must have paid all costs, fines and restitution associated with their cases and have completed a three-year waiting period after the end of their sentence or release from probation. They also can't have a drunken-driving conviction in the past five years.

Restoration of rights — which are lost when a person is convicted of a felony — has been on the books in Virginia since the 1700s.

This year, the state started the expedited process for nonviolent offenders because the office always gets swamped in presidential-election years.

Three local women — Gaylene Kanoyton, Gisele Russell and G.V. Watson — thought up the local restoration project as a civic project and coordinated with the pastors council.

"This is the election that can restore human dignity to thousands of people who have been disenfranchised in any number of ways: economically, educationally, in the justice system or with basic civil rights," Kanoyton said. "That's why we need to make sure everyone who is eligible actually gets out to vote."

Copyright © 2008, Newport News, Va., Daily Press
dailypress.com/news/local/dp-local_voterestore_0524may24,0,3530066.story

Posted by lois at 11:15 PM | Comments (0)

May 23, 2008

VA: Voting rights elusive for people with felony convictions

Voting rights elusive for ex-felons
Virginia joins Kentucky with harsh reinstatement laws
by : Scott Weaver
In the coming summer months, when Virginia Organizing Project (VOP) organizer Harold Folley knocks on doors and talks to folks about the 2008 elections, inevitably some will tell him that they aren’t able to vote. And just maybe, Folley will lean in and pry a bit, stick his nose in their business, and discover that a felony conviction, even decades old, has taken away someone’s civil rights.

The Sentencing Project, a national organization that works on criminal justice issues, estimates that 5.3 million Americans—one in 41 adults—have lost their voting rights because of a felony conviction. And while each state has its own laws regarding the restoration of a felon’s civil rights, Virginia has one of the harshest sets of laws that make restoring your civil rights after a felony conviction a slog through a bureaucratic wasteland.

Civil rights include the right to vote, hold public office, serve on a jury and serve as a notary public. They do not include the right to possess a firearm.

Virginia has one of the nation’s harshest policies for felons who wish to regain the rights to vote, serve on a jury and hold public office.

“We encourage people all we can,” says Sheri Iachetta, Charlottesville’s general registrar. “But that’s about all we can do. It’s a really daunting procedure.”

Virginia and Kentucky are the only two states that do not automatically restore convicted felons’ civil rights. Most states restore these rights upon the completion of a prison sentence, probation or parole. In Virginia, felons convicted of a nonviolent offense must wait three years after completing all court obligations—sentencing, fines and probation—then file an application for the restoration of rights to the Secretary of the Commonwealth.

If your conviction is for a violent offense —or a drug manufacturing or distribution offense—the process is much more difficult.

The nonviolent offender’s application is two pages. The violent application is 12. Iachetta calls the violent felony forms cumbersome. “They’re horrible,” she says.

After waiting five years after all court obligations, a person convicted of a violent felony must obtain a burdensome collection of paperwork: a letter from your most recent probation or parole officer, copies of your pre- or post-sentence report, certified copies of every order of conviction and sentencing orders, three letters of reference and, to top it off, a personal letter to the Governor explaining your convictions and how your life has changed.

Iachetta says that roughly half of the people she sees who start the process don’t complete it.

“There’s got to be an easier way,” says Iachetta. “I don’t know at this point what it is. The process can be streamlined. That being said, until it happens, we’ve got to deal with what we’ve got.”

Folley says that VOP will have 50 interns canvassing the state this summer, hoping to knock on 300,000 doors. Each will have restoration applications with them for anyone unable to vote because of a felony, violent or nonviolent. “We’ll have all the information for them that they’ll need.”

And if they are in Charlottesville, chances are they will be directed to Iachetta. Folley says her office has been extremely helpful to people navigating the state labyrinth of civil rights restoration.

Applicants drop by to use the phone, making the long-distance call to Richmond to check on applications that sometimes seem to go nowhere as the October 6 deadline to register to vote in the 2008 elections grows nearer. The Virginia League of Women Voters is also making restoration of civil rights one of its priority issues.

Iachetta says a six-month wait is typical.

“I’m seeing it a little longer than six months,” she says, “but I also know that there are a lot of people going through this process.”
http://c-ville.com/index.php?cat=141404064431134&ShowArticle_ID=11431905083135948

Posted by lois at 10:11 PM | Comments (0)

May 08, 2008

Western MA Inside Out Program: The more we imprison, the less we vote

Conor Clarke and Greg Yothers
The Boston Globe
The more we imprison, the less we vote

May 5, 2008

FOR THE past 12 weeks, we have both been students in an Amherst College class on citizenship. Unlike most college courses, however, this one isn't held in a classroom. Each week, as part of the nationwide program Inside-Out, we meet for 2 1/2 hours in the dimly lit visiting room of the Hampshire County Correctional Facility. Half the students in the class are from the college; half are inmates at the facility.

It is a class on citizenship with a cruel irony: Because of a 2000 amendment to the Massachusetts constitution disenfranchising incarcerated felons, half the students in the class cannot vote. In about a week, all of the Amherst students will leave for the summer; many will volunteer for a presidential campaign. This November, like most adult citizens, they will walk to a local polling station or cast absentee ballots from the comfort of a college dorm. The students inside the facility can't.

American incarceration has received a lot of attention recently. Last month, The New York Times reported that one in every 100 American adults is in prison, the highest rate in the world by a wide margin, and about six times higher than the world median. This drive to incarcerate has been rightly and roundly criticized as too expensive (it costs more per capita to imprison than educate) and too harsh, since the vast majority of inmates are serving time for nonviolent crimes. But amid the controversy over price and punishment, it tends to be forgotten that incarceration imposes a cost on American democracy: The more we imprison, the less we vote.

Why should that be the case? In early 2000, before the amendment passed, Governor Paul Cellucci told Bryant Gumbel of CBS News that disenfranchisement was necessary to ensure that felons did not damage the political process. Cellucci said, after a group of Massachusetts prisoners tried to organize a political action committee in 1997, he "thought that this was a little bit ridiculous, that prisoners would actually politically organize and try to lobby against the very laws that put them in prison to protect the people of this state." The clear implication was that, once you've broken the social contract, you've proved yourself unfit for any social contact, including the right to vote.

But our experience in class suggests that the opposite is true. We all write the same papers, read the same material by John Locke and Alexis de Tocqueville, and are all equally engaged in debating and discussing everything from the role of the good citizen to America's role in the world. There is no reason to think inmates are uniquely unqualified to wield a vote, and no reason to think they can't.

Yes, going to prison necessarily entails the loss of liberty. But the right to vote is in many ways more important than the right to walk freely down the street: Voting is the most basic check against the coercive power of the state. The places where that coercive power is most starkly exercised, such as prisons, are also the places where that most basic of checks becomes more important. The fact that prisoners have a big stake in governmental choices isn't an argument in favor of disenfranchisement; it's an argument against.

And because the vote is so essential to democratic citizenship, it is also an important part of reintegrating inmates with society. Prisons separate and divide, but at their best they also prepare inmates for life after imprisonment. Rebuilding civic engagement is perhaps the most important part of that process.

There are more than 25,000 inmates in Massachusetts correctional facilities, and more than half are racial minorities. Almost all of them will, at some point in the future, exit their cells and return to their homes and families. It would be better if they returned as voting citizens.

Conor Clarke is an Amherst College student; Greg Yothers is an inmate at the Hampshire County Correctional Facility.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.

Posted by lois at 05:13 PM | Comments (0)

April 22, 2008

What if 5.3 Million More Americans Could Vote?

What if 5.3 Million More Americans Could Vote?
By Erika Wood, AlterNet
Posted on April 21, 2008, Printed on April 22, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/82457/

This is a big year for American democracy. Hundreds of thousands of new voters are not only registering, but are actually showing up at the polls. States whose primary races have never counted before are suddenly the center of attention. Voters in Wyoming, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Kentucky, who have long gone ignored during primary season, finally find themselves with a voice and a vote. This year they matter.

Despite this, our democracy still falls far short of its promise to be a government that truly represents the will of its citizens. Across the country there are 5.3 million Americans who are denied the right to vote because of a felony conviction in their past. Nearly 4 million of these people are not in prison; they live, work, pay taxes, and raise families in our communities, but remain disenfranchised for years, often for decades, and sometimes for life.

States vary widely on when they restore voting rights to former prisoners. Maine and Vermont do not disenfranchise people with convictions; even prisoners may vote there. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia disenfranchise people only while they are incarcerated; five states disenfranchise those who are incarcerated or on parole, but allow people on probation to vote; 20 states disenfranchise people in prison, on parole, and on probation; and 10 states permanently disenfranchise some categories of people who have completed their correctional supervision. Kentucky and Virginia are the last two remaining states that permanently disenfranchise all people with felony convictions, unless they apply for and receive individual, discretionary clemency from the governor.

Jim Crow Roots

To fully appreciate how these laws compromise our democracy, it is important to understand their deep roots in the troubled history of American race relations. In the late 1800s these laws spread as part of a larger backlash against the adoption of the Reconstruction Amendments -- the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution -- which ended slavery, granted equal citizenship to freed slaves, and prohibited racial discrimination in voting.

Over time, Southern Democrats sought to solidify their hold on the region by modifying voting laws in ways that would exclude African-Americans from the polls. Despite their newfound eligibility to vote, many freed slaves remained effectively disenfranchised.

Violence and intimidation were rampant. The legal barriers employed -- including literacy tests, residency requirements, grandfather clauses, and poll taxes -- while race-neutral on their face, were intentional barriers to African-American voting.

Felony disenfranchisement laws were a key part of this effort. Between 1865 and 1900, 18 states adopted laws restricting the voting rights of criminal offenders. By 1900, 38 states had some type of felon voting restriction, most of which disenfranchised convicted felons until they received a pardon. At the same time, states expanded the criminal codes to punish offenses that they believed targeted freedmen, including vagrancy, petty larceny, miscegenation, bigamy, and receiving stolen goods. Aggressive arrest and conviction efforts followed, motivated by the practice of "convict leasing," whereby former slaves were convicted of crimes and then leased out to work the very plantations and factories from which they had ostensibly been freed. Thus targeted criminalization and felony disenfranchisement combined to produce both practical re-enslavement and the legal loss of voting rights, usually for life, which effectively suppressed the political power of African Americans for decades.

The disproportionate impact of felony disenfranchisement laws on people of color continues to this day. Nationwide, 13 percent of African-American men have lost the right to vote, a rate that is seven times the national average. In eight states, more than 15 percent of African-Americans cannot vote due to a felony conviction, and four of those states -- Arizona, Iowa, Kentucky, and Nebraska -- disenfranchise more than 20 percent of their African-American voting-age population.

These statistics mirror stark racial disparities in the criminal justice system. A recent study by the Pew Center on the States revealed that 1 in 100 Americans is now behind bars. That figure is startling enough, but the study also reports that 1 in 9 African-American men between the ages of 20 and 34 is in prison.

The Ripple Effect of Disenfranchisement

Felony disenfranchisement laws do not only impact those who lose their voting rights. Entire communities lose their political capital when their citizens cannot vote. Denying the vote to one person has a ripple effect, dramatically decreasing the political power of urban and minority communities.

Evidence suggests that disenfranchising the head of a household can discourage his or her entire family from civic participation. Many people's first experience with voting or political engagement comes through their parents -- by joining them at a town meeting, attending a school board hearing, or accompanying them into the voting booth. A parent can provide critical "how-to's" of voting, including such basics as how to register and where to vote. In fact, of the various factors included in the study, the parent's political participation had the greatest effect on the child's initial decision to vote.

Andres Idarraga, who recently had his right to vote restored by a recent change to Rhode Island's law, explained, "coming from a family in which voting had rarely, if ever, been discussed, this was a new beginning."

Throughout the country, minority communities have lost political influence thanks to felony disenfranchisement laws. In the last 25 years, as incarceration rates skyrocketed and African-Americans were sent to prison at a rate seven times that of whites, the political power of minority communities has been decimated. It's a simple equation: communities with high rates of people with felony convictions have fewer votes to cast. Consequently, all residents of these communities, not just those with convictions, lose their political influence.

What's more, even when people with felony convictions are eligible to vote, they are often de facto disenfranchised due to bureaucratic barriers. In 2003, Alabama could not process more than 80 percent of applications within statutory time limits, and completely failed to respond to dozens of applications. And in New York, Brennan Center surveys have repeatedly uncovered widespread confusion and misinformation among elections officials. In 2005, one third of local election boards mistakenly advised that people could not vote while on probation, and many illegally required unnecessary documentation before allowing people to register.

Dispelling Disenfranchisement Myths, Restoring Democracy

Fortunately, there are signs of progress. Advocates, policy-makers, and some unusual allies have made great strides towards restoring voting rights, and have built significant national momentum towards building a more just and inclusive democracy.

Critics of voting restoration argue that disenfranchisement is an appropriate punishment for breaking the law. But in fact, many in law enforcement have come to believe that felony disenfranchisement laws do more harm than good. The American Probation and Parole Association recently released a resolution calling for restoration of voting rights upon completion of prison, finding that "disenfranchisement laws work against the successful reentry of offenders." Many realize that, in terms of public safety, bringing people into the political process makes them stakeholders, helping to steer former offenders away from future crimes. As one Kentucky prosecutor wrote, "Voting shows a commitment to the future of the community." Branding people as political outsiders by barring them from the polls disrupts reentry into the community and does not do anything to keep people from re-offending. There is absolutely no credible evidence showing that continuing to disenfranchise people after release from prison serves any legitimate law enforcement purpose. Disenfranchisement has nothing to do with being "tough on crime."

Since 1997, 16 states have reformed their laws to expand the franchise or ease voting rights restoration procedures. Recent reforms include an executive order signed by then-Governor Tom Vilsack in Iowa which restored voting rights to 80,000 Iowa citizens on Independence Day, 2005. On Election Day 2006, Rhode Island voters were the first in the country to approve a state constitutional amendment authorizing automatic restoration of voting rights to people as soon as they are released from prison. The Rhode Island Department of Corrections became a voter registration agency, and now every individual is handed a voter registration form on the day they leave prison. In April 2007, Florida Governor Charlie Crist issued new clemency rules ending that state's policy of permanent disenfranchisement for all felony offenders. Also in April 2007, Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley signed a law streamlining the state's complicated restoration system by automatically restoring voting rights upon completion of sentence.

This law also eliminated the requirement that people in Maryland pay off any court-imposed fees and fines before being able to register to vote.

And just last month, Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear eliminated some of the burdensome requirements his predecessor imposed on people trying to get their voting rights restored. People with felony convictions are disenfranchised for life in Kentucky and can only regain their right to vote by receiving clemency from the governor.

Beshear's predecessor had required all applicants to provide three character references and write an essay explaining why they should get their right to vote back. While Kentucky still has a long way to go, Beshear's executive action was certainly an important step.

Still, millions of U.S. citizens continue to be denied the right to vote. This year, Congress has decided to address the issue on a national level. Senator Russ Feingold and Representative John Conyers will soon introduce the Democracy Restoration Act, a bill that seeks to restore voting rights in federal elections to all Americans who have been released from prison and are living in the community. In February, Senator Feingold, joined by former Republican Congressman and Bush I cabinet member, Jack Kemp, wrote, "once the criminal justice system has determined that [people] are ready to return to the community, they should receive the rights and responsibilities that come with that status, and should not continue to be relegated to second-class citizenship."

The energy and optimism spreading across our country this election season is palpable. But our democracy stands for nothing if not the fundamental tenet that each citizen is entitled to one vote, and each vote counts the same regardless of who casts it. The promise of our democracy will never be realized if 4 million Americans remain disenfranchised. It is time to end this last blanket barrier to the ballot box.

Erika Wood is Deputy Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law where she directs the Right to Vote project. Her most recent publication is "Restoring the Right to Vote."
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/82457/

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April 18, 2008

Oregon: State Diminishes 'More Liberal than Most'

Oregon: State Diminishes 'More Liberal than Most'

In March, a law was passed further disenfranchising Oregon residents. Thousands of individuals in Oregon's county jails are now ineligible to vote due to a new provision of House Bill 3638. Oregon law does not allow those incarcerated individuals to vote, but does restore voting rights to those on probation. "Previously, it was just individuals in the Department of Corrections" who couldn't vote, said Brenda Bayes, the deputy director of the state Elections Division in a Statesman Journal article . "This bill in the 2008 legislative session expanded that to also include felons in the custody of county jails. You can still register to vote, you just can't vote while you're incarcerated." According to the article, 35,000 formerly incarcerated individuals and probationers are allowed to vote, in addition to about 600 psychiatric and forensic patients at Oregon State Hospital who were charged with felony offenses.
From the Sentencing Project

Posted by lois at 03:54 PM | Comments (0)

April 04, 2008

FL: Florida's Process To Restore Suffrage Illustrates Haze

Felons' Voting Requests Pile Up
Florida's Process To Restore Suffrage Illustrates Haze
By GARY FIELDS
March 31, 2008
Wall Street Journal

MIAMI -- Republican Gov. Charlie Crist went against his party a year ago and made it easier for felons to regain their voting rights. The process has been slow, however -- stirring controversy in a state expected to be closely fought in this fall's elections.

Florida's clemency board has restored voting rights to nearly 75,000 residents. But nearly 96,000 requests are pending, according to information through March 20. Activists say there might be an additional 400,000 people who have been rejected without explanation, making it impossible for them to be reinstated.

[silent minority]

The fate of these votes is especially sensitive in Florida, where George W. Bush claimed the presidency by a mere 537 votes in 2000. But similar tensions are playing out across the country, with 5.3 million U.S. citizens unable to vote because of felony convictions -- including four million people who are no longer in prison, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.

Maine and Vermont are the only states that allow felons to vote while incarcerated. Thirteen others and the District of Columbia allow inmates to regain the right to vote after their release, according to the Sentencing Project, a Washington advocacy group. Other states limit voting based on factors including the severity of a crime, the completion of probation and the payment of fines.

Restoring the rights of all five million felons who can't vote is complicated by this patchwork system, said University of Florida political scientist Richard Scher, who noted, "There is no uniformity."

The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in Tennessee contending that the state's rules amount to a poll tax, a reference to the illegal restrictions imposed during the 1960s. The state requires felons to pay outstanding fines and child support before restoring their votes, something the two advocacy groups say penalizes the poor.

Richard Gooden of Alabama lost his right to vote in 2000 after a drunken-driving conviction. The secretary of state said Mr. Gooden had to appeal through the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles because the felony was considered a crime of "moral turpitude." The board refused his application, saying his crime didn't disqualify him from voting. The stalemate between the two agencies left him unable to register.

The 66-year-old was turned away from the polls in the 1960s when he couldn't recite the Alabama State Constitution by heart, part of a test designed to keep African-Americans from voting. This time, the state's Supreme Court restored his vote.

"You can be in a place where you're eligible to vote but not know you're eligible because of the complexities and disinformation," said Mr. Gooden's lawyer, Ryan Haygood, of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

In Florida, churches are hosting rights-restoration sessions. The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, a group of 40 organizations, is planning a daylong rally for April 1 in Tallahassee. The state's clemency board is trying to reach out to as many people as possible to tell them of the changes. It held 17 hearings across the state and is preparing a leafleting campaign in convenience stores, churches and other well-traveled areas.

Inside the fellowship hall of the Greater Bethel AME Church in the Overtown area of Miami, more than 100 residents with criminal records listened to representatives from the state attorney and public defender offices explain how felons can register.
[Ricky McGowan]

Those with more-serious crimes worked their way to the table staffed by the ACLU and University of Miami School of Law students. Ricky McGowan, 41 years old, spoke animatedly to one of the students while others lined up, waiting for a free chair. Mr. McGowan, a landscaper, has never voted. He lost his voting rights before he registered because at 18 he was convicted of conspiracy to commit armed robbery. He asked about the process and explained that he is worried an arrest for littering a year ago will further complicate his application.

"I done things I'm not proud of, and I'm different now; I'm a man," he said outside the hall. "But I can't go back and change what I did." Mr. McGowan said he doubts his rights will be restored in time. If he can, he will vote for Sen. Barack Obama. "I like Hillary; Hillary is all right, but Barack, Barack is something different," he said.

The change in Florida was controversial from the start. Mr. Crist's initial proposal was opposed by two Republicans who were members of the executive clemency board, Attorney General Bill McCollum and Secretary of Agriculture Charles Bronson. Mr. Crist revamped the idea, limiting the scope to nonviolent offenders, and Mr. Bronson signed on. To qualify, those felons must have completed their prison term, probation and parole, if applicable, and made any payments the court orders, including child support.

Mr. McCollum, with the backing of law-enforcement organizations, continued to oppose the measure, noting that authorities already had the power to restore voting rights on a case-by-case basis.

A spokeswoman for the attorney general said he has accepted the changes and now is focusing on better preparing inmates for their release.

The new process is simpler than the old method, but some want it to be faster still. It is "unnecessarily complicated, unnecessarily bureaucratic and unnecessarily slow," said Muslima Lewis, director of ACLU Florida's Racial Justice Project.

Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative legal advocacy group, said the old system could have been improved, but the new system goes too far. Each case should be reviewed, he said. "To assume someone has turned over a new leaf because they've walked out of prison doesn't make sense."

Good map from The Sentencing Project at this URL and at www.sentencingproject.org
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120692447687975721-EN6zQhkYtRXw4iHF9EneXxh3YKM_20080429.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top/

Posted by lois at 12:50 PM | Comments (0)

March 27, 2008

IL: Families fight closing of Stateville Prison

"Built north of Joliet in 1925, Stateville is home to 3,280 prisoners and is the closest state correctional facility to Chicago and its growing suburbs. Rather than spend an estimated $100 million to refurbish Stateville to the level of other maximum-security prisons, Blagojevich wants to close the section that houses the most violent criminals and ship them to more secure rural prisons hours away. While the closing could mean the loss of hundreds of jobs at Stateville‹and deal a financial hit to the communities around it‹state officials acknowledge the blow to families could have the most far-reaching effect."

Chicago Tribune
Families fight Stateville plan
Inmate transfers may cut ties to relatives

By Joel Hood | Tribune reporter
March 25, 2008

Seven days a week, the families gather in the small visitor's center outside the immense stone walls of the Stateville Correctional Center. They come in groups or one by one‹mothers, fathers, sons and daughters‹leaving one world and entering another.

Their reunions with inmates can last up to two hours, just once a week. While that's not much time, families say it's enough for talk and reflection, for the occasional smile and laugh.

So when plans surfaced last month to close the maximum-security wing of Stateville, relocating up to 1,600 inmates all over Illinois, the impact hit hard in this network of families.

"I'm honestly afraid we'll lose my brother if we can't see him and talk with him face to face," said Paula Carballido, 25, of Waukegan, whose 21-year-old brother, Juan, is four years into a 35-year murder sentence. "We don't want him to disconnect, to break off from the family."

Some of the families have begun writing letters and speaking to lawmakers at budget forums, such as one held Tuesday at Kennedy-King College on the South Side. They are organizing a bus trip to Springfield, where legislators must vote on Gov. Rod Blagojevich's budget proposal for the coming fiscal year. In the process, the families are casting light on their crucial but often overlooked contribution to the care and rehabilitation of prisoners.

There is a public safety element to the debate. Studies by the Washington, D.C.-based Vera Institute of Justice and elsewhere have shown inmates who had regular contact with family and friends while incarcerated were less likely to commit crimes once they were released. While family involvement does not guarantee a prisoner will stay on the right side of the law upon re-entering society, experts say there is perhaps no greater indicator of future success.

"The impact of separation is very significant," said Malcolm Young, executive director of the non-profit John Howard Association of Illinois, an inmate advocacy group. "In a lot of instances we're talking about children [of inmates]. And no matter what people say about the people who commit these crimes and go to jail, it's not the children's fault. They shouldn't be punished."

Built north of Joliet in 1925, Stateville is home to 3,280 prisoners and is the closest state correctional facility to Chicago and its growing suburbs. Rather than spend an estimated $100 million to refurbish Stateville to the level of other maximum-security prisons, Blagojevich wants to close the section that houses the most violent criminals and ship them to more secure rural prisons hours away.

While the closing could mean the loss of hundreds of jobs at Stateville‹and deal a financial hit to the communities around it‹state officials acknowledge the blow to families could have the most far-reaching effect.

"We understand families are a very important part of an inmate's success when they go out. That's part of what makes this so tough," said Department of Corrections spokesman Derek Schnapp. "But the No. 1 issue for us is safety and security."

On a recent rainy weekday, two dozen people crowded the one-room waiting area inside Stateville's visitor center. Carballido came with her younger sister Lucy, who was just 13 when Juan began his sentence. Now when she visits him, the older brother lovingly grills her about her friends and how she's spending her time out of school.

"He tells me not to hang out with certain kinds of people," Lucy Carballido said.

Similarly, Cicero resident Pearlie White frequently comes to Stateville to visit the father of her 17-year-old son. The man, Steve Robinson, has been serving a life sentence, but White often brings her son so the two can have some kind of a relationship. Despite his incarceration, Robinson is a "father figure" for her son and teenage daughter, she said.

"They would not have a man in their lives if not for [Robinson]," White said. "It might not be the best situation, but it's all we've got."

White, who travels the 30 miles between Cicero and Stateville by bus, said she wouldn't be able to visit Robinson if he transfers to a prison farther away. "The only contact we'd all have is over the phone. And that's just not the same," she said. "They can't close this place."

Schnapp said proximity to family is factored into where inmates are assigned. But it's not the deciding factor, he said, and inmates are often shipped from one prison to another to improve safety, alleviate crowding or for other reasons. If Stateville closes, some prisoners will be sent to the maximum-security wing of the next closest facility in Pontiac, 100 miles from Chicago. But others could be transferred to Thomson, which is 150 miles away from Chicago; to Menard, 350 miles away; or Tamms, 363 miles away.

Young, whose John Howard Association officially supports the closing, called the family element a "wrenching issue."

"These are families who typically don't have a lot of means to begin with," said Young, who is encouraging the state to work out cheaper bus and train fares for families visiting rural prisons.

For Paula Carballido and her family, the concern is not only that Juan remains free of the drug use and gang activity that is so common in prison life, but that he has a support system in place when he is released.

"He's in there for a long time, but not for life," Paula Carballido said. "He's going to come out eventually. When he does, I think everybody should want him to have the best chance he can."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-stateville_26mar26,1,2153695.st
ory

Posted by lois at 09:02 AM | Comments (0)

March 24, 2008

The Sentencing Project guide to 2008 Presidential Candidates' Platforms on Criminal Justice

The Sentencing Project guide to 2008 Presidential Candidates' Platforms on Criminal Justice. This guide provides information on a range of key criminal justice issues, including sentencing policy, reentry, felony disenfranchisement, and the death penalty.
http://www.sentencingproject.org/tmp/File/PresidentialCandidatesPlatforms.pdf

Posted by lois at 06:05 PM | Comments (0)

March 02, 2008

In Alabama, a Fight to Regain Voting Rights Some Felons Never Lost

By SHAILA DEWAN
NY Times
March 2, 2008

DOTHAN, Ala. — The Rev. Kenneth Glasgow, onetime criminal and founder of a ministry called The Ordinary People Society, spent years helping people with criminal records regain the right to vote in Alabama, where an estimated 250,000 people are prohibited from voting because of past criminal activity.

Then he discovered that many of them had never actually lost the right.

Because of a quirk in its Constitution, Alabama disqualifies from voting only those who have committed a “felony involving moral turpitude.” Those who have committed other felonies — like marijuana possession or drunken driving — can cast ballots even if they are still in prison, according to the state attorney general.

But it has been slow work cajoling public officials to enforce and publicize the law. Until Friday, the secretary of state’s Web site advised, incorrectly, that those with any kind of felony conviction could not register unless they had served their time and their right to vote had been restored by the Board of Pardons and Paroles.

Because neither the Legislature nor the attorney general has offered a definitive list of crimes involving moral turpitude, there is no way of knowing how many inmates are eligible to vote. But state agencies generally agree that those convicted of drug possession — at least 3,000 of Alabama’s 29,000 prison inmates and thousands more on probation — are eligible. Most felons and former felons, however, assume that they have lost the right to vote.

“This is an issue that’s never come up before,” said Richard F. Allen, the commissioner of corrections. “I would think that if there were any latent feeling out there that they wanted to vote, they would have expressed it by now.”

Mr. Glasgow, who is the half-brother of a far less obscure crusader based in New York, the Rev. Al Sharpton, believes that not only do inmates and former convicts want to vote, but also that their ballots could alter the political landscape in this Republican-leaning state, adding that his group has registered more than 500 people by visiting a handful of county jails.

“There would be a lot of difference in our legislators, our elected officials and our presidents that we’ve had,” he said. “It would definitely change the political spectrum of Alabama.”

Republicans agree. They railed against a statute passed in 2003 that made it easier for some former felons to regain their voting rights by side-stepping a lengthy and backlogged pardon process.

“There’s no more anti-Republican bill than this,” said Marty Connors, the chairman of the state Republican Party, according to news reports at the time. “As frank as I can be, we’re opposed to it because felons don’t tend to vote Republican.”

In the two years after the 2003 statute took effect, more than 5,500 former felons had their rights restored, and interest in the November presidential election is running high, said Sarah Still, manager of the pardons department. In January, Ms. Still received more than 280 applications for voting rights, up from an average of 140 a month last fall.

Nationally, 5.3 million people are barred from voting because of their criminal history, according to a 2004 estimate cited by the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice policy group. In the last decade, as criminals who were swept into prison during the drug war have been released and the difficulty of re-integrating them into society has become clear, at least 16 states have made it easier for former felons to vote.

But in the South, where restrictions on former convicts are among the most severe and in many cases date to Jim Crow laws, there have been fewer changes. Last Monday the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in protest of a 2006 Tennessee law that requires former convicts to pay back child support before regaining the right to vote. In Alabama, the Republican attorney general, Troy King, has proposed a constitutional amendment that would delete the moral turpitude clause, prohibiting all felons from voting.

Though he is an active Democrat, Mr. Glasgow, 42, says his main goal is not to aid his party but to help former inmates become productive members of society.

But for most of his own life he was hardly an exemplar of civic engagement. Mr. Sharpton, in his memoir, “Go and Tell Pharaoh,” says his parents’ marriage was wrecked when his father, Al Sharpton Sr., had an affair with his mother’s teenage daughter from a previous marriage, resulting in the birth of Kenneth.

By the time Kenneth was a teenager, his mother had taken him to her hometown, Dothan, Ala., where he began to get in trouble for selling drugs, became addicted to crack cocaine and did time in Alabama and Florida for armed robbery and other crimes.

It was during his longest stint in prison, nine years, that the genes of activism and oratory that run in Mr. Glasgow’s family emerged and he began to preach. When he was released in 2001, the bondsman who had repeatedly bailed him out of jail became treasurer of The Ordinary People Society and paid for Mr. Glasgow to attend seminary.

Mr. Glasgow opened a soup kitchen, held church services under a white tent and began to help former convicts like Anna Reynolds, a recovering addict, regain the right to vote — a process often made onerous by the moral-turpitude clause.

As a legal concept, moral turpitude refers to conduct that would be immoral even if it were not illegal, unlike, say, speeding. The delegates to the 1901 constitutional convention who used the term also took away voting rights for other infractions that they believed blacks were more likely to commit, like wife beating, adultery and vagrancy. In 1985 the United States Supreme Court struck down most of the law on the grounds that it was racially discriminatory, but the moral-turpitude clause remained.

Most officials in Alabama were unaware of the clause until 2005, when it came to light after a man on probation tried to vote in St. Clair County. The parole board requested clarification, and the attorney general responded with an incomplete categorization of felonies based largely on previous court decisions.

The opinion leaves a large gray area, said Ms. Still of the pardons department. It says, for example, that rape is a crime of moral turpitude and that assault is not, but offers no clarification on variations like statutory rape or assault with intent to kill.

The parole board settled on a policy of treating drug possession and drunk driving as crimes devoid of moral turpitude, but that has not put an end to the confusion, Mr. Glasgow said.

Initially Ms. Reynolds, 52, was told by the local registrar that she could not vote because of a conviction for drug possession. She applied to the parole board, which told her that it could not restore her right to vote because she had never lost it. Finally, The Ordinary People Society helped cut through the red tape.

On Feb. 5, Ms. Reynolds stood outside the public library handing out sample ballots before casting her own. “Voting, that’s part of getting back to normal life,” she said. “I’ve been out of the loop for a long time, and it was good to have help getting back into the loop.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/us/02felons.html?_r=1&sq=Alabama&st=nyt&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&scp=2&adxnnlx=1204473648-cWbxoAYTy5eI6xEz3aPH3g

Posted by lois at 11:06 AM | Comments (0)

February 29, 2008

TN: ACLU Sues Tennessee's Felon Disenfranchisement Law As Modern Day Poll Tax

ACLU Sues Over Tennessee’s Felon Disenfranchisement Law
2/25/2008
Group Says Payment Provision Is A Modern Day ‘Poll Tax’

NASHVILLE – The American Civil Liberties Union and ACLU of Tennessee filed a lawsuit today in federal court challenging the state’s 2006 law that made the restoration of voting rights for people convicted of crimes contingent on the payment of all outstanding legal financial obligations (LFOs), namely restitution and child support fees. According to the ACLU’s lawsuit, requiring some individuals to bear an undue financial burden before voting is tantamount to a poll tax in violation of the constitutional right to vote and the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause.

“Reports show that, nationally, over 50 percent of criminal defendants are indigent at the time of sentencing. Therefore, requiring a person with a criminal conviction to pay a fee before restoring their right to vote is nothing more than a modern day poll tax,” said Nancy Abudu, staff counsel with the ACLU Voting Rights Project. “This law locks citizens out of the democratic process when it comes to issues of great concern to them. The result is that the political power of poor people is further diminished and the collateral consequences of poverty multiply.”

Today’s legal action, filed against state and county officials, challenges a 2006 law that changed the process by which individuals with criminal convictions may seek the restoration of their voting rights. According to the law, “a person shall not be eligible to apply for a voter registration card and have the right of suffrage restored unless such person has paid all restitution to the victim or victims of the offense ordered by the court as part of the sentence... [and] unless such person is current in all child support obligations.”

The ACLU brought its lawsuit on behalf of three individuals – Terence Johnson, Jim Harris and Alexander Friedman – who have completed their terms of imprisonment, parole, and probation for their offenses. Johnson and Harris are ineligible to vote because they owe child support for children they currently have custody of. Friedman applied for restoration of his voting rights in 2006, but Tennessee denied his application, claiming he owes over 1,000 dollars in restitution.

“My dream is to have the opportunity to become a fully productive citizen again, regardless of my economic status. And I have the right to participate in the electoral process to bring about change to the issues that concern me most in my community,” said Terence Johnson, a plaintiff in this case. “I’ve served my time, I am a taxpaying citizen and I have custody of my daughter. It is wrong for the state to punish me and other people while we get our lives back on track.”

Until recently, Tennessee’s voting rights restoration law – a patchwork of rules, restrictions, and procedures – was the most confusing and complicated in the country. Although a former felon no longer needs to go before a judge to have his or her right to vote restored, the law still requires several procedural steps before restoration is complete. The ACLU is committed to securing additional reforms to make Tennessee’s voting laws more user-friendly and to ensure that all people who have been incarcerated can regain their full voting rights.

“The ability to vote should not be based on one’s financial status,” said Hedy Weinberg, Executive Director of the ACLU of Tennessee. “Penalizing low-income parents by charging them a fee to exercise their constitutional right to vote is shameful. This law has no place in a functioning democracy.”

In addition to the equal protection claim, the ACLU’s lawsuit charges the Tennessee law violates the 24th Amendment’s voting rights provision and the due process protections in the federal and state constitutions.

Attorneys on the case are Abudu, Laughlin McDonald and Neil Bradley of the national ACLU Voting Rights Project, Tricia Herzfeld of the ACLU of Tennessee, and attorney Charles Grant of the law firm Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, PC.
URL: http://www.aclu.org/votingrights/gen/34201prs20080225.html
A copy of today’s legal complaint is available at:
www.aclu.org/votingrights/gen/34203lgl20080225.html

Posted by lois at 10:10 PM | Comments (0)

February 08, 2008

AL: All votes count, even prisoners'

Today, there are more than 250,000 people in Alabama who have been disfranchised because of a felony conviction, but nearly 75,000 of these people were convicted of nonviolent drug offenses and have never legally lost their voting rights. Yet nowhere in our state can one find a system in place that distinguishes, for voting purposes, between those convicted of crimes of moral turpitude and those not. Everyone with a felony conviction is barred from voting, contrary to the law.

All votes count, even inmates'
Sunday, February 03, 2008

As Alabama prepares for the presidential primaries Tuesday, my organization, The Ordinary People Society, has been busy registering people to vote. Our work takes us all over the state, including into many jails and prisons. My staff and I have gone to jails in Dothan, Montgomery, Enterprise, Birmingham and Huntsville to register people to vote. Our goal is simple: to ensure those persons who have the right to vote are able to do so, wherever they are.

Most Alabamians don't know there are thousands of people in our jails and prisons who are legally eligible voters. Alabama's constitution takes away the right to vote from those convicted of crimes of "moral turpitude." This controversial practice is called disfranchisement. But many crimes, including nonviolent drug offenses, do not qualify as crimes of moral turpitude and, thus, persons convicted of these crimes never lose their right to vote. Recently, rulings by the state Supreme Court and findings by state Attorney General Troy King have reaffirmed this.

The overwhelming majority of the people affected by this illegal practice are black. While blacks make up only 26 percent of our state population, we comprise fully 62 percent of the prison population. Our overcrowded prisons now hold nearly 30,000 people - nearly a third of which are incarcerated on low-level drug charges, mostly simple marijuana possession. These individuals are eligible voters under our constitution.

After visiting jails and prisons throughout the state and registering thousands of voters, I can tell you these people are not being notified of their voting rights, nor is there a system in place that allows them to exercise those rights.

The struggle for equality under the law - especially for voting rights - is a part of our state's history. But as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. emphasized, this struggle is a long one, and it's not yet complete in Alabama.

My organization wants to ensure that everyone's basic voting rights are protected. Voting is the basic foundation of a functioning democracy. With Super Tuesday coming up, registering voters is an important task. In Alabama jails and prisons, there are men and women entitled to vote but never given the opportunity. These votes can change elections; just think of the falsely disfranchised black voters in Florida during the 2000 presidential election.

Equality suffers when constitutional rights aren't made equally available. It tarnishes our image as a state and nation when we so blatantly disregard essential, sovereign rights. To make our democracy credible, we have to fairly enforce our laws and ensure that everyone has his rights protected. Otherwise, how far will we have really progressed toward equality?

On King's birthday this year, I registered voters in the Houston County jail. I believe it is what King would have wanted from us - to work for justice. If we are to have equality in our great nation, we must protect the vote for all those who are legally entitled to it, even if they happen to be incarcerated.

I say, let my people vote. From the back of the bus, to the front of the prison, the struggle continues.
The Rev. Kenneth Glasgow is executive director of The Ordinary People Society in Dothan. E-mail: topssociety@yahoo.com.

Posted by lois at 05:01 PM | Comments (0)

Amy Goodman : Denying felons a vote has substantial impact

Published: 02.07.2008

My opinion Amy Goodman : Denying felons a vote has substantial impact

As I raced into our TV studio for our Super Tuesday morning-after show, I was excited. Across the country, initial reports indicated there was unprecedented voter participation, at least in the Democratic primaries, several times higher than in previous elections. For years I have covered countries like Haiti, where people risk death to vote, while the United States has the lowest participation rates in the industrialized world. Could it be this year would be different?
Then I bumped into a friend and asked if he had voted. "I can't vote," he said, "because I did time in prison." I asked him if he would have voted. "Sure I would have. Because then I'm not just talking junk, I'm doing something about it."

Felony disenfranchisement is the practice by state governments of barring anyone convicted of a felony from voting, even after they've served their time. In Virginia and Kentucky, people convicted of any felony can never vote again (this would include "Scooter" Libby, even though he never went to jail, unless he is pardoned).
Eight other states have permanent felony disenfranchisement laws, with some conditions that allow people to rejoin the voter rolls: Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Mississippi, Nevada, Tennessee and Wyoming.
Disenfranchisement — people being denied their right to vote — takes many forms, and has a major impact on electoral politics. In Ohio in 2004, stories abounded of inoperative voting machines, too few ballots or too few voting machines. Then there was Florida in 2000. While many continue to accuse Ralph Nader of throwing the election to George Bush, Nader got about 97,000 votes in Florida. Ten times that number of Floridians are prevented from voting at all. Why? More than 1.1 million Floridians have been convicted of a felony, and thus aren't allowed to vote.
We can't know for sure how they would have voted, but as scholar, lawyer and activist Angela Davis said recently in a speech honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Mobile, Ala., "If we had not had the felony disenfranchisement that we have, there would be no way that George Bush would be in the White House."
Since felony disenfranchisement disproportionately affects African-American and Latino men in the United States, and since these groups overwhelmingly vote Democratic, the laws bolster the position of the Republican Party. The statistics are shocking. Ryan King, policy analyst with The Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C., summarized the latest:
● 5.3 million U.S. citizens are ineligible to vote due to felony disenfranchisement; 2 million of them are African-American. Of these, 1.4 million are African-American men, which translates into an incredible 13 percent of that population, a rate seven times higher than in the overall population.
● Forty-eight states have some version of felony disenfranchisement on the books. All bar voting from prison, then go on to bar participation while on parole or probation. Two states, Maine and Vermont, allow prisoners to vote from behind the walls, as does Canada and a number of other countries.
The politicians and pundits are all abuzz with the massive turnouts at the primaries and caucuses. There are increasing percentages of women participating, and initial reports point to more young people. The youth vote is particularly important, as they have less invested in the status quo and can look with fresh eyes at long-standing injustices that disenfranchise so many.
In this context, one of The Sentencing Project's predictions bears repeating here: "Given current rates of incarceration, 3 in 10 of the next generation of black men can expect to be disenfranchised at some point in their lifetime. In states that disenfranchise ex-offenders, as many as 40 percent of black men may permanently lose their right to vote."
The Sentencing Project's King said: "We are constantly pushing for legislative change around the country. But public education is absolutely key. There are so many different laws that people simply don't know when their right to vote has been restored. That includes the personnel who work in state governments giving out the wrong information."
I called my friend to tell him he was misinformed. He hadn't been on probation or parole for years. "You can vote," I told him. "You just have to register." I could hear him smile through the phone.
Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now," which airs in Tucson on radio station KXCI (91.3-FM) and Access Tucson. For broadcast times and to e-mail Goodman, go to Web site www.democracynow.org
http://www.azstarnet.com/opinion/223938

Posted by lois at 04:58 PM | Comments (0)

November 16, 2007

Brennan Center for Justice: NY- Testimony on Disenfranchisment

Today 87% of those currently disenfranchised in New York are Latino and African American.

http://www.brennancenter.org/dynamic/subpages/download_file_50919.pdf
Testimony of Brennan Center for Justice
Before the New York State Commission on Sentencing Reform November 13, 2007. For the complete testimony go the URL above.

________________________

Sentencing Reform Commission Gets It Right On Voting Rights
For the first time in 40 years, New York's hodge-podge sentencing procedures are poised for a thorough review and revision.

In March Governor Spitzer tasked the State Commission on Sentencing Reform, an 11-member body of law enforcement officials, state legislators and criminal justice experts, with creating a proposal for streamlining the state's sentencing structure.

The Commission's preliminary report, which was released last month, includes an enlightened recommendation to restore voting rights to people on parole in New York.

It's about time. A quick peek into the history of the state's felony disenfranchisement law reveals ugly origins:

Back in 1821, delegates at the state¹s Constitutional Convention brainstormed how new requirements could be used to exclude African Americans from the polls. Their efforts resulted in Article II of the state constitution which imposed special property requirements on African Americans and established a felony disenfranchisement provision which the delegates believed would target African Americans.

Fast-forward to the present, and that same misguided felony disenfranchisement provision remains in tact today, and it has achieved its intended result: 87% of those currently disenfranchised in New York are Latino and African American.

The disenfranchisement provision not only makes election administration more confusing (Brennan Center surveys have revealed that even a good portion of Board of Elections officials get confused about who can vote), but also dilutes the voting power of New Yorks communities of color.

On Tuesday, advocates and experts had a chance to give the Commission comments at a public hearing at the New York City Bar Association. (A hearing in Albany is being held today, and one is scheduled for next Monday in Buffalo).

The Brennan Center's Erika Wood testified in favor of restoring voting rights upon release from prison and outlined how the Governor could change the current law through executive order.

The Commission recognizes that fostering civic participation is one way to facilitate the re-entry process, and that restoring the right to vote to people on parole is fundamental to that participation. Hopefully the Governor will heed the Commission's wise counsel.
http://reformny.blogspot.com/2007/11/sentencing-reform-commission-gets-it.ht
ml
--Jude Joffe-Block, Research Associate, Democracy Program

Posted by lois at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

November 03, 2007

FL: Rights-restoration process needs to focus on finding jobs

Article published Oct 26, 2007
Tallahassee Democrat
Rights-restoration process needs to focus on finding jobs
By Mark Schlakman
MY VIEW

The governor and Cabinet, sitting as Florida's Board of Executive Clemency, changed the clemency rules several months ago to enable more ex-offenders to regain their civil rights to vote, to serve on a jury and to hold public office after they complete their sentences. At the time, the prevailing view was that Gov. Crist accomplished as much as was possible in the face of strong opposition from Attorney General Bill McCollum and measured resistance from Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson.

Notwithstanding the governor's determination and support that he received from CFO Alex Sink, that simply wasn't the case. And Crist readily acknowledged that the rule changes amounted to an important step forward but fell short of achieving comprehensive reform.

He maintained that, “Once a prisoner serves his or her debt to society, the state should automatically restore his or her civil rights so that the ex-offender may vote and become gainfully employed."

Under the new rules, more ex-offenders are eligible to regain their civil rights without a hearing before the Clemency Board after they complete their sentences. Others are subject to higher levels of scrutiny and in many instances will require a hearing.

Recent trends suggest the vast majority of rights restoration cases that now go to hearing ultimately will be denied.

The Department of Corrections advised that, from April 5 to Oct. 10, it reviewed 600,000 ex-offender case files that date back to 1980. About 150,000 appeared to be eligible for rights restoration without a hearing. All of the rights restoration case files are sent to the Parole Commission, which serves as the investigative arm of the Clemency Board, for further review. In addition to the historical cases, about 3,000 ex-offenders are released from DOC custody every month.

It was reported that 35,000 ex-offenders regained their civil rights since the new rules were adopted. State officials claim that more ex-offenders regained their civil rights during this period than during any other comparable period in recent memory. Despite this progress and setting aside independent studies that indicate there may be as many as 950,000 ex-felons residing in Florida without their civil rights, it may nevertheless take years to process all of the pending cases.

Crist's efforts to change certain aspects of the rights-restoration process were laudable but it is now abundantly clear that the governor and Cabinet must revisit and reengineer that process to achieve more comprehensive reform.

Two fundamental problems must be addressed:

Employment restrictions: Ex-offenders are ineligible for a wide array of state occupational licenses and jobs that require state certification unless they can demonstrate that their civil rights have been restored.

Florida appellate courts have been critical of this misplaced reliance upon rights restoration. Employment eligibility issues and related public-safety concerns that may correspond to any given job must be separated from clemency deliberations and redirected to state regulatory agencies and licensing boards where they could be more effectively addressed. The rights restoration process was never intended to serve this larger purpose.

Gov. Bush's Ex-Offender Task Force recommended such a course of action in late 2006 in an effort to remove some of the arbitrary barriers to post-release employment which, in turn, would help to reduce relatively high recidivism rates. The Legislature passed a bill this year that implemented these Task Force recommendations within the construction industry.

Rather than wait until next spring for the Legislature to consider whether to expand these provisions to all occupational licenses and jobs that require state certification, Crist can sign an executive order at any time directing the agencies and boards that he oversees to implement these recommendations immediately.

Bronson and Sink oversee the agencies and boards that do not report to Crist. They can issue similar directives. Legislators can revisit these matters during the next regular session to codify executive action and reconcile other laws that may be at cross-purposes with the task force recommendations.

Once the linkage between rights restoration and ex-offender eligibility for various jobs is broken, there would be no compelling need to distinguish violent offenses from non-violent offenses to determine fitness to vote. Similarly, there would be no need to subject rights-restoration cases to multiple levels of scrutiny and cumbersome and costly investigations.

Restitution rule: Significant numbers of ex-offenders owe restitution. They are currently ineligible to regain their civil rights by rule until they satisfy that obligation in full. If, as a result, they are ineligible for otherwise appropriate jobs that pay living wages and therefore unable to earn sufficient income to make restitution payments, the rule perpetuates the problem. Everybody loses, including the crime victims.

As a matter of public policy, ex-offenders should be required to pay all court-ordered restitution; however, it is counter-productive to require that it be paid-in-full as a pre-condition for rights restoration. The governor and Cabinet should repeal or substantially modify this long-standing clemency rule. Apart from clemency, the state could improve relevant enforcement mechanisms to facilitate restitution payments along the lines of legislation that was enacted years ago to address delinquent child support payments.

Only then will civil-rights restoration in Florida reflect the kind of fundamental fairness that the governor has been talking about.

Posted by lois at 04:06 PM | Comments (0)

September 13, 2007

Massachusetts: District Court Rules in Felony Disenfranchisement Case

Massachusetts: District Court Rules in Felony Disenfranchisement Case

The U.S. District Court of Massachusetts has opened the way for a challenge to the state's disenfranchisement policy as a violation of the Voting Rights Act. On August 30, the Court issued a ruling in Simmons v. Galvin, a case challenging that state's disenfranchisement laws. The plaintiffs had argued that the state of Massachusetts incorrectly denied their right to vote in federal and state elections.

In its ruling, the Court denied the state's motion for a summary judgment on the plaintiff's claim that Massachusetts' disenfranchisement policy violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The plaintiffs had argued that the racially disproportionate impact of the state's felony disenfranchisement policy violated the Act. The Court ruled that "[i]t may be difficult for plaintiffs to prove that racial bias in the court system exists and has interacted with other cognizable factors to render" the Massachusetts policy unlawful, but they should be given the opportunity to make that case in court.

The Court rejected two additional arguments of the plaintiffs. First, the plaintiffs had contended that the change to the Massachusetts law in 2000 that denied the right to vote to persons who are currently incarcerated should not apply to them because they were incarcerated prior to the constitutional amendment that resulted in the policy change. They argued that to deny their right to vote was a violation of the Ex Post Facto Clause of the United States Constitution. The Court disagreed, ruling that the Ex Post Facto Clause does not apply to "civil, non- punitive measures" intended "for the regulation of the franchise." The Court held that the "amendment was intended to be primarily civil and regulatory, rather than punitive, in nature."

Secondly, the plaintiffs argued that Massachusetts' disenfranchisement policy violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. In granting the state's motion for summary judgment, the Court pointed to the established ruling in Richardson v. Ramirez upholding the practice of felony disenfranchisement as clear evidence that the law in Massachusetts does not run afoul of the Constitution.

- - - - - -

Posted by lois at 04:14 PM | Comments (0)

August 17, 2007

NC: Education and Awareness to Reinstated Voters in the Works

From The Sentencing Project. August 17, 2007
North Carolina: Education and Awareness to Reinstated Voters in the Works
The state passed HB1743, an election reform bill which will require the State Board of Elections, the Department of Corrections, and the Administrative Office of the Courts to provide written notice to formerly incarcerated persons informing them of their right to vote upon completion of sentence and provide them with a voter registration form. The bill, which will "jointly develop and implement educational programs and procedures for persons to apply to register to vote at the time they are restored to citizenship" awaits the governor's signature.

Posted by lois at 06:37 PM | Comments (0)

WA: State's system for restoring voter rights unfair, unwieldy

Guest columnist
State's system for restoring voter rights unfair, unwieldy
Seattle Times, August 14, 2007
By Kathleen Taylor
Special to The Times

Consider two people who are convicted of felonies. Both go to prison and serve their time. But one is able to vote upon release from custody, while the other will not be able to vote for many years after release, perhaps ever.

What makes the difference — seriousness of the offense? Length of sentence? Personal history?

In Washington, the answer is "none of the above." The person with more money is far more likely to regain the right to vote. This is because of a state law — recently upheld by the Washington Supreme Court — under which the right to vote will be restored only after payment of all court costs and other related financial obligations. And that includes interest, which accrues at 12 percent per year.

In practice, this means a wealthy citizen may be able to vote again almost immediately; a citizen who cannot afford to pay the financial portions of the sentence right away may wait many years, maybe forever, to vote again.

The system for restoring voting rights isn't just unfair. It is so complex and confusing that it causes major problems at election times. Election officials find it devilishly complicated to figure out who still owes money on a sentence. The Department of Corrections stops keeping records after persons have completed their terms of custody. Payments are made to a network of county court clerks; they each have their own accounting systems that were never designed to interface with voter-registration rolls.

As a result, state and local officials often are uncertain exactly who is eligible to vote. In short, this is a broken system.

The effects of the law are widespread, affecting tens of thousands of citizens. The vast majority of people convicted of crimes in Washington are poor when they enter prison, and even poorer when they leave. Once out, it can be difficult for them to find decent-paying jobs. Overall, only a small portion of the people convicted of felonies in Washington are ever able to vote again after they have served their time.

The loss of voting rights hits racial minorities especially hard. Felony disenfranchisement affects 3.6 percent of the state's total voting-age population, but 10.6 percent of the Latino population and 17.2 percent of the African-American population.

As a matter of principle, a democratic society should never condition the right to vote on a person's wealth. Poll taxes have been justly outlawed. And, we normally do not use the right to vote as a method of debt collection. People with unpaid parking tickets also owe money to the state, but they are not disenfranchised.

Many states have a more-sensible, streamlined system. Our Northwest neighbors, Oregon and Montana, automatically restore the right to vote at the end of the term of imprisonment. A simple, clear rule based on whether a person is currently incarcerated would have eliminated some of the confusion we saw in the 2004 elections. Anyone not in prison who is otherwise eligible may register to vote. Any other system requires election officials to become bogged down in a maze of paperwork, subject to mistakes and second-guessing.

The current system also places a barrier to rehabilitation of people who have served their time. At least two recent studies have shown that people who vote after their release from prison are far less likely to commit future crimes than those who do not. As a matter of public safety, the state should encourage full political participation.

Fortunately, the Legislature can fix this broken system. No constitutional amendment is required. In 2007, Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, D-Seattle, and Rep. Jeannie Darneille, D-Tacoma, sponsored automatic-restoration bills. The Secretary of State's Office and the Department of Corrections supported the legislation. So did a wide array of organizations, including the League of Women Voters, the Washington State Labor Council, the Paralyzed Veterans of America, and the Washington Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs.

Though the legislation did not pass this year, it will be up for consideration again in 2008.

Gov. Christine Gregoire has observed that Washington's current re-enfranchisement system creates "a virtual debtor's prison." It doesn't have to be that way. We should join the states that automatically restore voting rights once people have finished their prison sentences. And, we shouldn't wait to act until after the next major election.

Kathleen Taylor is executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington.

Posted by lois at 06:33 PM | Comments (0)

August 10, 2007

Stars and Bars

The Nation
posted August 9, 2007 (August 27, 2007 issue)
Stars and Bars
Daniel Lazare

How can you tell when a democracy is dead? When concentration camps spring up and everyone shivers in fear? Or is it when concentration camps spring up and no one shivers in fear because everyone knows they're not for "people like us" (in Woody Allen's marvelous phrase) but for the others, the troublemakers, the ones you can tell are guilty merely by the color of their skin, the shape of their nose or their social class?

Questions like these are unavoidable in the face of America's homegrown gulag archipelago, a vast network of jails, prisons and "supermax" tombs for the living dead that, without anyone quite noticing, has metastasized into the largest detention system in the advanced industrial world. The proportion of the US population languishing in such facilities now stands at 737 per 100,000, the highest rate on earth and some five to twelve times that of Britain, France and other Western European countries or Japan. With 5 percent of the world's population, the United States has close to a quarter of the world's prisoners, which, curiously enough, is the same as its annual contribution to global warming. With 2.2 million people behind bars and another 5 million on probation or parole, it has approximately 3.2 percent of the adult population under some form of criminal-justice supervision, which is to say one person in thirty-two. For African-Americans, the numbers are even more astonishing. By the mid-1990s, 7 percent of black males were behind bars, while the rate of imprisonment for black males between the ages of 25 and 29 now stands at one in eight. While conservatives have spent the past three or four decades bemoaning the growth of single-parent families, there is a very simple reason some 1.5 million American children are fatherless or (less often) motherless: Their parents are locked up. Because they are confined for the most part in distant rural prisons, moreover, only about one child in five gets to visit them as often as once a month.

What's that you say? Who cares whether a bunch of "rapists, murderers, robbers, and even terrorists and spies," as Republican Senator Mitch McConnell once characterized America's prison population, get to see their kids? In fact, surprisingly few denizens of the American gulag have been sent away for violent crimes. In 2002 just 19 percent of the felony sentences handed down at the state level were for violent offenses, and of those only about 5 percent were for murder. Nonviolent drug offenses involving trafficking or possession (the modern equivalent of rum-running or getting caught with a bottle of bathtub gin) accounted for 31 percent of the total, while purely economic crimes such as burglary and fraud made up an additional 32 percent. If the incarceration rate continues to rise and violent crime continues to drop, we can expect the nonviolent sector of the prison population to expand accordingly. A normal society might lighten up in such circumstances. After all, if violence is under control, isn't it time to come up with a more humane way of dealing with a dwindling number of miscreants? But America is not a normal country and only grows more punitive.

It has also been extremely reluctant to face up to the cancer in its midst. Several of the leading Democratic candidates, for example, have recently come out against the infamous 100-to-1 ratio that subjects someone carrying ten grams of crack to the same penalty as someone caught with a kilo of powdered cocaine. Senator Joe Biden has actually introduced legislation to eliminate the disparity--without, however, acknowledging his role as a leading drug warrior back in the 1980s, when he sponsored the bill that set it in stone in the first place. At a recent forum at Howard University, Hillary Clinton promised to "deal" with the disparity as well, although it would have been nice if she had done so back in the '90s, when, during the first Clinton Administration, the prison population was soaring by some 50 percent. Although he is not running this time around, Jesse Jackson recently castigated Dems for their hesitancy in addressing "failed, wasteful, and unfair drug policies" that have sent "so many young African-Americans" to jail. Yet Jackson forgot to mention his own drug-war past when, as a leading hardliner, he specifically called for "stiffer prison sentences" for black drug users and "wartime consequences" for smugglers. "Since the flow of drugs into the US is an act of terrorism, antiterrorist policies must be applied," he declared in a 1989 interview, a textbook example of how the antidrug rhetoric of the late twentieth century helped pave the way for the "global war on terror" of the early twenty-first.

In other words, cowardice and hypocrisy abound. Fortunately, a small number of academics and at least one journalist have begun training an eye on America's growing prison crisis. Since there is more than enough injustice to go around, each has zeroed in on different aspects of the phenomenon--on the political and economic consequences of stigmatizing so many young people for life, on the racial consequences of disproportionately punishing young black males and on the sheer moral horror of needlessly locking away real, live human beings in supermax prisons that are little more than high-tech dungeons. Their findings, to make a long story short, are that the damage cannot be reduced to a simple matter of so many person-years of lost time. To the contrary, the effects promise to multiply for years to come. In American Furies Sasha Abramsky, a Sacramento-based journalist and longtime Nation contributor, convincingly argues that the best way to understand US prison policies is to think of them as a GI Bill in reverse. Just as the original GI Bill laid the basis for a major social advance by making college available to millions of veterans, mass incarceration is laying the basis for an enormous social regression by stigmatizing and brutalizing millions of young people and "de-skilling" them by removing them from the workforce. America will be feeling the effects for generations.

Bruce Western, a Princeton sociologist, offers the best overview. He notes in his new study, Punishment and Inequality in America, that mass imprisonment is actually a novel development. For much of the twentieth century, the US incarceration rate held steady at around 100 per 100,000, which would put it in the same ballpark as Western Europe today. But after a slight dip following the liberal reforms of the 1960s, the curve reversed direction in the mid-'70s and then rose more steeply in the '80s and '90s. Considering that Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Austria succeeded in reducing or holding their incarceration rates steady during this period, the US pattern was highly exceptional. But so are US crime rates. Between 1980 and 1991, US homicides hovered at between 7.9 and 10.2 per 100,000, as much as ten times the European average. (The rate has since fallen to around 5.7.) Combined with the crack wave that also exploded in the 1980s, the result was a deepening sense of panic that peaked in mid-1986 with the death of basketball star Len Bias from a cocaine overdose. Although there was no evidence that crack had anything to do with Bias's death--police found only powdered cocaine in his car--the incident somehow confirmed crack as the new devil substance, "the most addictive drug known to man," in the words of Newsweek, and a threat comparable to the "medieval plagues," in the considered opinion of U.S. News and World Report (which would have meant that the country was facing an imminent population loss of up to 33 percent). Within a matter of months, Joe Biden had helped shepherd through to victory the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, an unusually horrendous piece of legislation that etched in stone the 100-to-1 penalty ratio for crack.

Still, it is always interesting to consider which deaths fill people with horror and which ones don't. The year before Bias's death not only saw 19,000 homicides in the United States but nearly 46,000 highway fatalities too, and yet Congress somehow refrained from criminalizing motor vehicles. Crack's status as the drug du jour of a certain class of inner-city blacks should have been the giveaway. What had Congress in a tizzy was not cocaine consumption so much as black cocaine consumption, which is why the subsequent repression was bound to be far harder on African-Americans than on whites. Although there is no evidence that blacks use drugs more than whites and indeed some evidence that they use them less, Western notes that black users are now twice as likely to be arrested for drugs and, once arrested, more likely to go to prison or jail. None of this is necessarily racist, at least not in the crudely explicit way we associate with men in white sheets. The reason the police concentrate their efforts in black inner-city neighborhoods, Western notes, is that users congregate there in large numbers, and buying, selling and using tend to take place in public. (It's harder to make arrests behind the closed doors of some suburban
McMansion.) If a judge is more inclined to send a poor black defendant to prison, similarly, it is not necessarily because he or she enjoys punishing someone with dark skin but because the judge, according to Western, may "see poor defendants as having fewer prospects and social supports, thus as having less potential for rehabilitation." If your weeping parents can afford to send you to private rehab, you're excused. If not, it's off to the state pen.

Racial and class biases are thus built into the very structure of the drug war. Western is particularly effective on the economic consequences of such grossly disproportionate policies. The standard account of American economic development since the 1970s, told and retold in countless undergraduate classrooms, is that economic deregulation and growth have done much to narrow the once-yawning wage gap between white and black workers. To quote the New York Times: "Unemployment rates among blacks and Hispanic people...are at or near record lows. Joblessness among high school dropouts has fallen to about half the rate in 1992. And wages for the lowest paid are rising faster than inflation for the first time in decades." A rising tide lifts all boats, whereas all that labor-market rigidity has done for "Old Europe" is to saddle it with persistently high levels of unemployment, an alienated underclass and riots in the banlieues. But as Punishment and Inequality in America points out, if US economic policies look good, it is only because the country's enormous prison population is not factored into the equation. If workers behind bars are counted, then it quickly becomes apparent "that young black men have experienced virtually no real economic gains on young whites" and that the real black unemployment rate is up to 20 percent greater than official statistics indicate. Rather than freeing up the markets, Western writes, the United States has "adopted policies that massively and coercively regulated the poor." Where the Danes provide their unemployed with up to 80 percent of their previous salary and the Germans provide them with 60 percent, America has deregulated the rich while throwing a growing portion of its working class in jail.

In Marked, Devah Pager, who also teaches sociology at Princeton, uses a simple technique to show how mass incarceration has undone the small amount of racial progress achieved in the 1960s and '70s. Working with two pairs of male college students in Milwaukee, one white and the other black, she drilled them on how to present themselves and answer questions. Then, arming them with phony résumés, she sent them out to apply for entry-level jobs. The résumés were identical in all respects but one. Where one member of each team had nothing indicating a criminal record, the other's résumé showed an eighteen-month sentence for drugs. To help insure that the results were uniform, the résumés were then rotated back and forth among the testers.

The results? The white applicant with a prison record was half as likely to be called back for a second interview as the white applicant without. But the black applicant without a criminal record was no more likely to be called back than the white applicant with a record, while the black applicant with a record was two-thirds less likely to be called back than the black applicant without. The black applicant with a record therefore wound up doubly penalized--as a black man and as an ex-con. With the chances of a call-back reduced to just 5 percent, the overall effect, Pager writes, was "almost total exclusion from this labor market." Considering that there are as many as 12 million ex-felons in the United States, a major portion of them black, the result has been to create a huge pool of the semi-permanently unemployed where one might otherwise not exist. This is not to disprove sociologist William Julius Wilson, whose study The Declining Significance of Race caused an uproar when it was published in 1978. Wilson may have been
right: The significance of race may well have been declining by the late '70s. But thanks to a government policy of mass stigmatization, it has come roaring back.

This is not only bad news for those arrested but bad news for those who have to foot the bill for their incarceration and for dealing with the social problems that labor-market exclusion on this scale helps generate. But there are other costs too. In Locked Out, Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, professors of sociology at Northwestern and the University of Minnesota, respectively, point out that only two states, Maine and Vermont, permit felons to vote while incarcerated, that most limit felons' voting rights after they complete their terms and that, even if not legally disenfranchised, some 600,000 jail inmates and pretrial detainees are effectively prevented from voting as well. All told, this means that 6 million Americans were unable to vote on election day in 2004. This is not peanuts. Nationwide, one black man in seven has been disenfranchised as a consequence, while in Florida, the state with the most sweeping disenfranchisement laws, the number of those prevented from voting now exceeds 1.1 million.

From a right-wing perspective, this is nothing short of brilliant. After all, what could be better than disenfranchising an unfriendly racial group while persuading the rest of the nation that the group deserves it because its ranks are filled with violent criminals? Since felons and ex-felons tend to be poor and members of oppressed racial minorities, they tend to vote Democratic. Even though the poor are less likely to vote than those higher up on the socioeconomic ladder, Manza and Uggen say there is little doubt that, had the disenfranchisement laws not existed in Florida in November 2000, the extra votes would have provided Al Gore with a margin of victory so comfortable that not even the Republican state legislature could have taken it away. If the ranks of prison inmates and hence of disenfranchised ex-inmates had not multiplied since the '70s, much of the wind would also have been taken out of the sails of the great GOP offensive. Americans have not gone right, in other words. Rather, by taking control of the criminal-justice issue, the right wing has winnowed down the electorate so as to artificially boost the power of the conservative minority.

But how did the right gain control of this all-important issue in the first place? This is the problem that Marie Gottschalk, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, wrestles with in The Prison and the Gallows, an eccentric but compelling study of mass incarceration's ideological origins. While taking aim at the usual right-wing villains, The Prison and the Gallows also goes after various liberals and radicals who, inadvertently or not, also contributed to the construction of "the carceral state." Bill Clinton, for example, not only embraced the drug war and capital punishment--he interrupted his 1992 presidential campaign to fly back to Arkansas and sign the death warrant for a mentally disabled prisoner named Rickey Ray Rector--but also endorsed what Gottschalk calls "a virulently punitive victims' rights movement," going so far as to call for a constitutional amendment in 1996 as "the only way to give victims equal and due consideration."

This was important because the victims' rights movement represented an effort to inject a dose of vengeance into the judicial process and thereby blur the distinction between the private interest of the victim and the public's interest in maintaining order and justice. In Europe, reformers were also concerned with victims' rights. But "extending a hand to victims was seen from the start as primarily an extension of the welfare state," Gottschalk observes, whereas in America, where welfare is a dirty word, it was seen as a way of steering criminal justice in a more punitive direction.

Gottschalk's assault on '70s feminism is sure to raise the most eyebrows. She argues that the women's movement helped facilitate the carceral state by promoting a punitive approach to sexual violence that was unmitigated by any larger political considerations. This single-minded focus led to what The Prison and the Gallows describes as unsavory coalitions with tough-on-crime types. In the State of Washington, women's groups successfully marketed rape reform as a law-and-order issue so that, when the measure finally passed in 1975, it was "in part by riding on the coattails of a new death penalty statute."

In California a new rape shield became known as the Robbins Rape Evidence Law, in honor of one of its legislative sponsors, a conservative Republican named Alan Robbins. In pressing for limits on the cross-examination of alleged rape victims, feminists "generally did not consider what effect such measures would have on a defendant's right to due process," Gottschalk adds, even though due process at the time was under assault from a growing war on crime. More radical elements, meanwhile, strayed into outright vigilantism. In Berkeley, antirape activists picketed an accused rapist's home. In East Lansing in 1973, they "reportedly scrawled Rapist on a suspect's car, spray-painted the word across a front porch and made warning telephone calls late at night." In Los Angeles, a self-styled "antirape squad" vowed to shave rapists' heads, cover them with dye and then photograph them for posters reading, This Man Rapes Women. A feminist publication called Aegis ran a notorious cover showing a gun with the warning, "You can't rape a .38; we will defend ourselves."

The National Rifle Association was no doubt delighted. Gottschalk contends that such activists wound up "profoundly co-opted," since "by framing the rape issue around 'horror stories,' they fed into the victims' movement's compelling image of a society held hostage to a growing number of depraved, marauding criminals." She notes that feminists threw themselves into the battle for the Violence Against Women Act, which passed in 1994 as part of an omnibus anticrime bill that "allocated nearly $10 billion for new prison construction, expanded the death penalty to cover more than fifty federal crimes, and added a 'three strikes and you're out' provision mandating life imprisonment for federal offenders convicted of three violent offenses." Yet feminists' involvement was relatively modest two years later when a few liberals tried to rally opposition to Clinton's plan to abolish Aid to Families With Dependent Children, which heavily benefited poor women. Like their nineteenth-century forebears, who advocated bringing back the whipping post to deal with wife beaters, late-twentieth-century feminists got more excited about punishment than defending the welfare state.

Gottschalk is more than a bit brave in pointing this out. Still, her choice of historical examples to explain the growth of an increasingly vindictive national mood seems incomplete. As much damage as radical feminists may have done in undermining due process, they seem less important than certain ant-drug activists--in particular, certain black Democratic antidrug activists--whose efforts ran on parallel tracks. This means not just Jesse Jackson, who backed vigilante-style antidrug patrols by the Nation of Islam ("As long as this type of solution is within the law, it should be encouraged") but also Congressman Charles Rangel, the Manhattan Democrat who, as head of the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse, spent much of the '80s baiting Reagan for being soft on drugs. "I haven't seen a national drug policy since Nixon was in office," Rangel lamented at one point. "So far, the Administration hasn't given it any priority." This is as clear a case of an ostensible liberal cheering on the forces of right-wing reaction as one could hope to find. US prisons are not bulging with rapists and wife beaters, but they are filled with drug offenders, some 458,000 as of 2000, which makes the brief space that Gottschalk allots to the drug war somewhat hard to fathom. It's like discussing Al Capone without mentioning Prohibition.

Sasha Abramsky is less interested in the ideological currents that helped pave the way for mass incarceration, although in American Furies he does spotlight the fascinating role played by a Berkeley-educated sociologist named Robert Martinson, who, after several years investigating the cornucopia of rehabilitation programs offered at the time by the New York State prison system, summed up his findings in a sensational 1974 article titled "What Works?" His answer: nothing. Martinson's frustration is understandable to anyone who has ever suffered through an encounter group. Yet his conclusions, published in the neoconservative journal Public Interest, were grossly one-sided: While many programs do not work, some clearly have a positive effect.

In short order, Martinson's article became the bible of the vengeance-and-punishment set, which seized on it as proof that rehabilitation was a lost cause and that the only purpose of prison was to penalize wrongdoers. Once this ideological impediment was removed, the criminal-justice system slid downhill with remarkable speed. If punishment was good, then more punishment was better. In short order, Massachusetts Governor William Weld was declaring that life in prison should be "akin to a walk through hell," while right-wing Senator Phil Gramm was promising "to string barbed wire on every military base in America" to contain all the criminals he wanted to round up. In Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix, a colorful local character named Joe Arpaio got himself re-elected sheriff time and again by parading his inmates about on chain gangs, dressing the men among them in fluorescent pink underwear and serving prisoners food that, as he cheerfully admits, costs less than what he gives to his cats and dogs. "Voters like it everywhere," Abramsky quotes Arpaio as saying of such policies. "I'm on thousands of talk shows. I never get a negative. I get letters from all over the world--and I answer every one. They say, 'Come up here and be our sheriff.'" What makes this all the more repellent is that the people subjected to such humiliation and abuse are rarely killers or rapists but alcoholics, vagrants and other small fry doing time for such misdemeanors as possession and shoplifting.

Amazing how much damage a single article can do, eh? Yet when a conscience-stricken Martinson published a mea culpa in the Hofstra Law Review five years later ("contrary to my previous position, some treatment programs do have an appreciable effect on recidivism"), the media yawned. No big shots interviewed him on TV, and no politicians called to solicit his views. No one wanted to hear that rehabilitation programs work, only that they don't. Beset by personal troubles, professional setbacks and perhaps the realization of how grievously he had allowed himself to be misused, Martinson committed suicide by throwing himself out of a ninth-floor Manhattan apartment in 1980. American Furies provides us with a vivid account of the horrors that have followed--the low-level pot dealers and shoplifters sentenced to life in prison in California, Oklahoma, Alabama and other states where various "three strikes" or other habitual-offender laws pertain; the supermax prisoners condemned to spend twenty-three hours a day in barren concrete cells the size of walk-in closets; the epidemics of suicide and self-mutilation; and the stubbornly high levels of violence between and among prisoners and guards--which law-and-order advocates seize upon as reason to build yet more supermax facilities. US prison policy is like a computer program that is designed to spit out the same answers no matter what data are fed into it: Arrest more people, put more of them in prison, build more cells to accommodate them.

Where will it end? As Martinson's story shows, American mass incarceration is not what social scientists call "evidence based." It is n