May 22, 2019
Page 9
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Mass Incarceration Impacts our Democracy
Voting should be
a right even for
inmates
r obert P. a lvarez
Should Americans
caught up in the justice
system be stripped of
their right to vote?
Sen. Bernie Sand-
ers catapulted the issue into the
spotlight when he declared his un-
equivocal support for the voting
rights of prison inmates at a recent
town hall.
“I think the right to vote is in-
herent to our democracy,” he said.
“Once you start chipping away
and you say, that person commit-
ted a terrible crime, not gonna let
him vote… you’re running down a
slippery slope.”
Sens. Kamala Harris and Eliz-
abeth Warren were more cautious,
but didn’t explicitly disagree. For-
mer Rep. Beto O’Rourke said he
was in favor of allowing “non-vi-
olent” offenders to vote while in-
carcerated.
South Bend, Indiana mayor
Pete Buttigieg, alone among Dem-
ocrats, was a hard no on any in-
mate voting.
by
Republicans, by contrast, have
raised the idea of Boston Mara-
thon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
or white supremacist murderer
Dylan Roof voting as a
way of shooting down the
entire discussion.
Of course, Tsarnaev
and Roof are but two of
the over 2.3 million pris-
oners locked up in “the
land of the free.” Using
one or two examples to justify
condemning over 2 million people
is always unsound. But it’s espe-
cially repulsive in this instance.
In all, 14 states and D.C. bar
prisoners from voting. Twen-
ty-two other states, to varying de-
grees, restrict voting during parole
or probation.
Twelve more ban people with
felonies from voting for a time
even after their release — and in
Kentucky and Iowa, permanently.
(Virginia bans them permanently
too, but the state’s governor has
been automatically restoring vot-
ing rights to people who complete
their sentences).
The impact of all this on our de-
mocracy is striking.
One in 10 Kentuckians can
never vote again due to a felony
conviction. For black Kentucki-
ans, the rate of permanent felony
disenfranchisement is even great-
er, at one in four.
It’s not hard to understand why
Republicans want to keep it this
way. Thanks to a racially biased
justice system, black and Hispan-
ic adults are much more likely to
be convicted of felonies. They’re
also much more likely to vote for
Democrats.
Republicans know this. Just last
November, a super-majority of
Floridians voted to re-enfranchise
1.5 million folks with prior felo-
ny convictions — including 1 out
of 5 black Floridians. Yet before
the ink could even dry, Florida’s
GOP-led House passed legislation
restricting the measure and apply-
ing a poll tax on returning voters.
The gamesmanship gets even
more perverse when you consider
the Census, which counts prison-
ers as residents of the areas where
they’re confined.
That inflates the populations of
Republican-leaning small towns
and rural areas where most state
prisons are located. That means
more federal money and more
legislative seats, even though the
inmates can’t vote for who holds
them. Are you seeing the hypoc-
risy yet?
Forbidding inmate voting,
disenfranchising them after re-
lease, and counting them as res-
idents where they’re imprisoned
are all components of a terrible
practice known as prison gerry-
mandering.
It looks and smells a lot like the
3/5 compromise — an old consti-
tutional practice allowing South-
ern states to count three-fifths of
their enslaved population when
apportioning House seats, Elec-
toral College votes, and federal
funding.
For too long, inmates have been
an easy punching bag for politi-
cians. Voting should be an inalien-
able right — even for inmates,
and especially for those who’ve
served their time. No amount of
single-case scare tactics should
ruin it for the lot.
Mass incarceration is now a bi-
partisan concern. Its effects on our
democracy should be too. And if
that’s a problem because it could
swing a few elections, the prob-
lem isn’t prisoners — it’s the sys-
tem that locks up an entire voting
bloc.
Robert P. Alvarez works in
communications at the Institute
for Policy Studies. Distributed by
OtherWords.org.
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