This is in-effect less a diary than a belated comment in response to teacherken’s June 11 diary In Prison Reform, Money Trumps Civil Rights, which I only just happened across. teacherken talked about a couple of recent publications, one of which was Michelle Alexander’s book on prisons entitled The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
teacherken linked to The New Press regarding Alexander’s book:
“In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet, as legal star Michelle Alexander reveals, today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against convicted criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal.”
teacherken wrote:
“Some of her arguments are familiar - she has two paragraphs where she discusses the rate of incarceration in the US compared to other nations and unequal rate of incarceration for African Americans versus white. For the first she uses the figure of 2.3 million - that coincides with the Bureau of Justice Statistics figures for 2009, and at more than 7/10% of our population represents the highest rate in the world. She notes that
“‘Convictions for non-violent crimes and relatively minor drug offenses - mostly possession, not sale - have accounted for the bulk of the increase in the prison population since the mid-1980s.’
“and [she] adds
“‘African-Americans are far more likely to get prison sentences for drug offenses than white offenders, even though studies have consistently shown that they are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites.’”
teacherken continued, “at the publisher's website we can read the following paragraph from the book, which helps explain its title:
“‘Jarvious Cotton's great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.’”
teacherken concluded:
“I do not think there is any question that future generations will judge this time harshly. Even were we to rapidly make some of the changes we need, not only on this matter, they will perhaps look back and wonder how for three decades we allowed our rights to be diminished, we went from an emphasis on liberty and freedom to an emphasis on economics and profits without regard to the damage such emphasis did - to rights, to the fabric of society, to the future of the nation, to the well-being of the world.
“The well-being of the world - we continue to despoil the environment, as a nation we continue to exert undue influence for economic reasons thereby destabilizing other societies and fomenting hatred against our nation, we show a lack of respect for other cultures if doing so restricts our ability to act or the profits we can obtain.
"‘When will we ever learn?’ That is the question Pete Seeger asked in ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’
“It is the question that pieces like that of Michelle Alexander bring to my mind.
“What say you?”
What I have to say relies on my own fragmentary experiences with incarceration and voting, and is and correspondingly limited in its scope. This is an anecdotes-only diary.
The first anecdote dates from 1994, a miserable Democratic year and the first year in which I served as Democratic County Chair in my Republican-plurality community. Going in, five of the nine members of our county delegation to the State House of Representatives were Democrats. However three of the Democrats did not seek reelection in 1994. I was involved most intimately in one of those open-seat contests, a contest in a preponderantly poor and working-class area. I talked to the Democratic nominee many nights, after dark when he came in from door-to-door.
He described doorstep after doorstep where only the woman of the house was registered. She would just about always be a Democrat and he would feel okay about her vote. He always tried to register others in the household, and the man in the house (house after house), could not register because of his felony criminal history. Every time we talked, the candidate soberly asserted that it was fortunate that the men couldn’t vote. For when asked they would self identify as 2nd Amendment voters (as we politely describe them), and would have been unwinnable by a Democratic candidate.
The second anecdote dates from a couple of years after that, while I was still County Chair. That 1994 candidate (by then a House Member) introduced me to his officemate in the legislature. I learned that she represented a district that had very, very few voters … so few that she could take every voter in the district out and buy them a steak between elections if she wanted to. It turned out that she represented a community with a couple of very large correctional facilities where everybody had to be counted in the census (and ergo the house district apportionment), but hardly anybody was qualified to vote. I have often imagined that if the people she represented could vote, they might not have chosen a Democrat. They might have sent a traveling vice lord or a crip to the statehouse. I believe we would have had a more representative (and certainly more diverse) legislature, if a had been occupied by a manacled man in a jumpsuit surrounded by taser-wielding corrections officers with shoulders growing out of their ears.
The third anecdote dates from perhaps 2003 or 2004. I was working then (as I do now) as a criminal defense lawyer, and spent a great deal of time at the Jail. I learned that at that time I could get a list by name of everyone booked in to the County Jail, and a break-down of which ones were convicted felons. Perusal of that list revealed that of perhaps 500 people booked-in to (to wit: living in) the County Jail, fewer than 50 were convicted felons. (Those figures are pretty rough, since it has been years since I looked at the actual numbers, but they accurately represent the substance of what I saw.) Without explaining it to death, suffice it to say the overwhelming majority were either awaiting felony trial or serving a misdemeanor sentence.
I contemplated putting together a request to register to vote by mail/request to vote by mail packet with all of the legal and appropriate forms (all in English and Spanish), and sending a packet and return postage to each if the 450+ persons who could have/should have been voting.
Like my friend, the 1995 statehouse freshman, I do not labor under the misapprehension that everyone who voted would vote Democratic. When an accused violent felon mentions politics to me, he is invariably a Ron Paul fan. But I regret not following through on trying to register the many, many eligible persons at our County Jail. I would have paid a heavy price for the logistical nightmare that would have confronted the corrections staff. (The Jail could hardly pass out hundreds of sharpened pencils to inmates in the blind expectation that they would use the pencils to vote.) But I believe that the exercise would have reminded everyone that the overwhelming majority of residents of our County Jail have not forfeited their right to vote (and ergo their right to be treated with dignity). And it would have had a useful rehabilitative effect on inmates and their families.
And a lot of them would have voted Democratic.
teacherken’s June 11 diary gave some fairly serious and badly needed treatment to what I believe to be one of the paramount civil rights issues of our time.