Let's look at a couple of good diaries today and connect another dot with this one. There was one outlining the private prison industry, another by VL Baker about the voter suppression in Florida.
I don't know of anything more fundamental to a healthy country than the right to vote. But what can you say about a country that has:
* the highest per capita prison population in the world
* disproportionate number of felons (and prisoners) are black.
* companies are making big bucks by acquiring and holding prisoners.
* there is one party dedicated to restricting voting rights.
--- one more dot to connect - see below ---
* 5.85 million people were forbidden to vote in 2010 because of felon disenfranchisement.
We can't call the US a democracy anymore can we?
Prison is not a picnic. It is not a relaxing vacation away from the hubbub of making a living. People who pay their debt to society via a prison sentence have earned the chance to be readmitted back into society and carry on with the responsibilities of citizenship. That includes voting. Instead the US has this:
I doubt the pattern of cool tones vs. warm tones in that map surprises anyone. Although we're looking at you too, Washington and Minnesota. And you can't hide, NJ, DE, and MD.
Read, learn, get engaged. There are a lot of good organizations on top of this issue. I've bolded some material for people that only have time to skim it. IF you want to skip to the summary, just scroll to the bottom.
Where do these laws come from?
In the 1870s and 1880s, for instance, Southern states created a whole new class of crimes—like “vagrancy”—which were punished by disenfranchisement and mandatory labor. And of course, the effect of these measures was to re-enslave African Americans in everything but name.
By the turn of the century, disenfranchisement was codified in Southern state constitutions. One of the most egregious examples comes from Virginia, where then Delegate Carter Glass—the future Senator Glass of Glass-Steagall—praised felon disenfranchisement as a plan to “eliminate the darkey as a political factor in this state in less than five years.”
In other words, Holder isn’t exaggerating. The felon disenfranchisement laws we have on the books are, in the most literal sense, a vestige of Jim Crow, and—with their hugely disproportionate effect on African Americans—they work as intended. It’s as if they are legislative zombies—survivors of our initial assault on apartheid—that won’t die until we strike at the head, and finish them for good.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/...
Ben Jealous:
Felony disenfranchisement has direct roots in the Jim Crow Era. In the late 19th century, states above and below the Mason-Dixon Line began to find new and creative ways to keep black voters away from the polls. Banning people with felony convictions was one of the solutions.
For example, in 1901 the Commonwealth of Virginia had 147,000 black voters on the rolls. But many lawmakers saw this growing political block as a threat. At that year's Constitutional Convention, they hatched a plan to disenfranchise African Americans through a combination of black codes and felony disenfranchisement. One legislator said on the record that the plan would "eliminate the darkey as a political factor."
Ninety years later, Kemba Smith-Pradia was an undergraduate student at Hampton University. She got involved with the wrong crowd and found herself behind bars as an accessory to a nonviolent drug offense. President Clinton granted Kemba executive clemency in 2000, six years into her 24-year sentence. She went on to become a college graduate, law student, mother and foundation president -- but until 2012, when her rights were finally restored, not a voter.
Kemba's story is just one example of how the legacy of the 1901 Convention lives on. In today's Virginia, 350,000 people are still disenfranchised by the 1901 law, and many of them are African Americans.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Eric Holder:
Across this country today, an estimated 5.8 million Americans – 5.8 million of our fellow citizens – are prohibited from voting because of current or previous felony convictions. That’s more than the individual populations of 31 U.S. states. And although well over a century has passed since post-Reconstruction states used these measures to strip African Americans of their most fundamental rights, the impact of felony disenfranchisement on modern communities of color remains both disproportionate and unacceptable.
Throughout America, 2.2 million black citizens – or nearly one in 13 African-American adults – are banned from voting because of these laws. In three states – Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia – that ratio climbs to one in five. These individuals and many others – of all races, backgrounds, and walks of life – are routinely denied the chance to participate in the most fundamental and important act of self-governance. They are prevented from exercising an essential right. And they are locked out from achieving complete rehabilitation and reentry – even after they’ve served the time, and paid the fines, that they owe.
...
Eleven states continue to restrict voting rights, to varying degrees, even after a person has served his or her prison sentence and is no longer on probation or parole – including the State of Florida, where approximately 10 percent of the entire population is disenfranchised as a result. In Mississippi, roughly 8 percent of the population cannot vote because of past involvement with the criminal justice system. In Iowa, action by the governor in 2011 caused the state to move from automatic restoration of rights – following the completion of a criminal sentence – to an arduous process that requires direct intervention by the governor himself in every individual case. It’s no surprise that, two years after this change – of the 8,000 people who had completed their sentences during that governor’s tenure – voting rights had been restored to fewer than 12.
https://www.brennancenter.org/...
More on Iowa:
In Iowa, the third swing state in question, there was also an earlier effort at reform, but last year the new governor, Terry Branstad, rescinded an executive order that had returned voting rights to ex-felons. As Kevin Drum " reported last month, former felons in Iowa must fill out a 31-question application seeking information including the address of the judge who handled the conviction. Felons also must supply a criminal history report, which takes weeks to obtain, and the review itself can take up to six months. Drum writes:
Henry Straight, who wants to serve on the town council in the tiny western Iowa community of Arthur, is among those whose paperwork wasn't complete. Straight can't vote or hold office because as a teenager in Wisconsin in the 1980s, he was convicted of stealing a pop machine and fleeing while on bond. Straight spent a year on the effort and hired a lawyer for $500 to help. Yet he was notified by the governor's office [in May] that he hadn't submitted a full credit report, only a summary, or documentation showing he had paid off decades-old court costs. "They make the process just about impossible," said Straight, 40, a truck driver. "I hired a lawyer to navigate it for me and I still got rejected. Isn't that amazing?"
http://www.motherjones.com/...
For a map showing the rate of felon disenfranchisment for blacks see
page 13 at the Sentencing Project study (based on 2010 data).
I'll give our friend Harry Enten some credit for one of his better articles at the Guardian:
The people overwhelmingly affected by these laws are minorities. Only 2.5%, 5.8 million people, in the voting age population were made ineligible to vote by felon voting laws in 2010, according to the Sentencing Project (pdf). That percentage tripled to 7.7% among African-Americans. Another way of putting this is that 38%, 2.2 million, of all those stopped from voting by felon restrictions are black. About a million black ex-felons (i.e. those who have "paid their debt to society") are disenfranchised.
...
Not surprisingly, these voters would vote overwhelmingly Democratic. A study of felon voting patterns (pdf) from 1972 to 2000 found on average 30% of felons and ex-felons would vote if given the chance, and about three out of four would vote for the Democratic nominee for president. This would have doubled Al Gore's margin in the national vote. Of course, it's the vote tallies at the state level that determine winners in United States elections.
http://www.theguardian.com/...
Summary:
The GOP did not just steal the 2000 Presidential election. The GOP has been stealing dozens if not hundreds or thousands of elections around the country for decades. And their main tactics are an assault on People of Color and the most basic element of democracy: an individual's right to vote. In many states, they are tactics literally based on Jim Crow laws.
There are many important issues that rank #1. But if this systemic issue of voting is not taken care of, from where is the electoral political power going to come to make progress on those other #1 issues? We have to be able to win at the ballot box in a fair vote.
I assume all our Democratic Prez candidates want to fight this. I know Sen. Sanders does and has cosponsored the Democratic Restoration Act of 2015.
I urge those who are cynical about this country's politics and inclined not to vote, to ask themselves if they want to leave so many faithful Democrats (African-Americans) disenfranchised. Consider whether your vote belongs to you only or whether you have some responsibility to those who cannot vote due to the injustice in this country.
Call your senators and reps and make sure they get on board the efforts to strengthen our democratic rights.