February 24, 2016
Black History Month
Page 19
O PINION
New Prices
Effective
May 1, 2014
Ending Lifetime Sentences on Voting Rights
Martin
Cleaning
Service
An unduly
punitive law
made right
M arc h. M orial
A wrong has been
made right in the state
of Maryland.
In a long overdue
reversal led by the
state’s
legislature,
ex-offenders in Mary-
land—citizens who have done the
proscribed time for their crime—
will automatically regain the right
to vote once they have been re-
leased from jail.
Prior to this vote, Maryland
required all individuals with past
felony convictions to complete
all terms of their probation and
parole before their access to the
polls could be restored through
what many described as a lengthy
and confusing process.
The previous policy—which
disproportionately impacted com-
munities of color—was unduly
punitive; delaying and denying
by
men and women who paid their
debt to society and completed
their prison sentences the quint-
essential right of any citizen who
lives in a democracy. Such tactics
of voter disenfranchisement must
not be tolerated or become
an acceptable policy option
in a nation that professes to
be governed by democratic
tenets.
Once the Maryland bill
becomes law, an estimat-
ed 40,000 men and women
currently on felony probation or
parole will have their right to vote
restored—many of them in time
to vote for their local and nation-
al leaders, including our nation’s
new president.
While there is much to applaud,
we must recognize that this victo-
ry is a drop in the proverbial buck-
et. Today, in the United States of
America, almost six million citi-
zens are effectively locked out of
the democratic process because of
laws that disenfranchise citizens
convicted of felony offenses.
Maryland now joins 13 other
states, plus the District of Co-
lumbia, in immediately restoring
the voting rights of ex-offenders
upon their release. There are nine
states that permanently bar certain
ex-offenders from voting at all.
Two states, Maine and Vermont,
do not restrict voting rights to any
citizen with a criminal conviction,
even those still in prison, but this
is a battle that must continue to be
fought around our nation.
Among other beneits, voting
promotes public safety. When we
allow citizens to fully re-integrate
back into society the transition
must include more than securing
employment or housing. While
those pursuits and others are im-
portant, civic engagement can es-
tablish a vested interest in the well
being of the communities where
ex-offenders make their homes,
work and pay taxes.
Because of the enduring tan-
gle of race and the criminal jus-
tice in our nation, the majority of
convicted felons disproportion-
ately come from racial and ethnic
communities, effectively disen-
franchising not only individuals
but entire communities. The res-
toration movement is therefore
a movement to confront racial
discrimination in the criminal
justice system. Throughout our
nation, nearly one in 13 Afri-
can-American adults is banned
from voting because of these
laws. And it should come as no
surprise that the states that have
the harshest policies just happen
to be those states with legacies
of slavery, segregation, discrimi-
nation, voter suppression and the
denial of the right to vote. Felon
disenfranchisement is a tactic
to suppress the vote, as much
as voter id laws and it must be
stopped.
America should not be in the
business of denying individuals
the right the vote. We are a stron-
ger and truer democracy when we
offer all citizens this fundamental
right. Denying an ex-offender the
right to vote serves no real pur-
pose other than to undermine the
democratic principles on which
our nation is founded.
Marc H. Morial is president
and chief executive oficer of the
National Urban League.
Every Young Black Kid Gets ‘the Talk’ on Racial Proiling
‘i aM k alief b roWder ’
by b randen M iles
The day before I
started high school,
my father took me
up to the park around
the corner from our
house to have “the
talk.”
It’s the talk black
families had when Trayvon Mar-
tin was shot and killed in Florida.
It’s the talk we had when Michael
Brown was shot and killed in Mis-
souri. It’s the talk we had when
Tamir Rice was shot and killed
in Ohio. And it’s the talk we had
when Sandra Bland was found
dead in a jail cell following a traf-
ic stop in Texas.
If you’re a black teen, it’s a talk
about how to survive.
My dad made sure I understood
that I was going to be proiled —
even put in danger of harm or ar-
rest — simply because of the color
of my skin.
I didn’t have to wait long to
experience this harsh reality irst-
hand. When I was 16, my friends
and I walked through a popular
entertainment store in Cambridge,
Mass. to meet up with some of our
classmates.
A security guard at the door
stopped us.
He looked at each of us, and
then asked us to empty our back-
packs. Confused, we protested
that we hadn’t touched any-
thing — and we hadn’t. But
the image of three young
black guys passing through
a store with backpacks was
enough make the security
guard suspicious. It felt like
he was presuming our guilt.
My friends and I were
lucky enough to be released with-
bing someone of a backpack — a
crime he said he didn’t commit
— Browder wound up spend-
ing three years at the notorious
Rikers Island prison before the
charges were inally dropped. He
spent two of those years in soli-
tary coninement.
Browder’s torture was so se-
vere that he took his own life
shortly after his release in 2013.
Browder’s torture was
so severe that he took his
own life shortly after his
release in 2013. He was
just 22.
out charge. However, on any giv-
en day, over 50,000 young people
are detained in state and local pris-
ons nationwide. Although young
black people are just 17 percent of
the nation’s juvenile population,
we account for 31 percent of all
juvenile arrests.
Kalief Browder — a 16 year-
old kid from New York — was
once accused of stealing, just
like us. Awaiting trial for rob-
He was just 22.
President Barack Obama men-
tioned Browder recently, when he
issued an executive order banning
juvenile solitary coninement in
federal prisons. That was a wel-
come step, though it leaves the
much greater number of young
people locked up in state and local
prisons without the same protec-
tion.
The recent U.S. Supreme Court
decision Montgomery v. Louisi-
ana, on the other hand, does offer
some relief to incarcerated youth
at the state level. The ruling up-
held a previous decision that
mandatory life sentences without
parole for people under 18 were
unconstitutional. Moreover, it
worked retroactively, requiring
that anyone who’d received the
sentence when they were still un-
derage must have the opportunity
to argue for their release.
These two decisions relect
positive steps towards criminal
justice reform, but they’re only
helpful to young people who’ve
already been arrested and locked
up. That’s not enough. Every level
of our legal system must be exam-
ined not only for inhumane deten-
tion practices and police brutality,
but also racial proiling.
I didn’t know Kalief Browder,
but I do know that the criminal
justice system sees me the same
way it saw him. That’s because
we share three traits that presume
our guilt: Being young, black, and
male.
It’s time to change that. Be-
cause I don’t want to have to give
“the talk” to my own child.
Branden Miles interns on the
Criminalization of Poverty Proj-
ect at the Institute for Policy Stud-
ies. Distributed by OtherWords.
org.
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