Photo licensed to Daily Kos
The author of this piece, Blair Bowie, is an attorney with the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit organization that helps people with past convictions restore their voting rights.
Senator Bernie Sanders declared that no American should lose their right to vote because of a felony conviction, even while incarcerated. Several other candidates for President of the United States have been pressed for their position on this, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg opposes voting rights for incarcerated people. As a result, some commentators frame the question of voting from prison as a left-wing wedge issue limited to states like Vermont or Maine. But we begin from the wrong starting point when discussing this issue. The question shouldn’t be whether imprisoned people should be able to vote, but instead whether an American citizen should ever lose the cherished right to vote in the first place.
“The question shouldn’t be whether imprisoned people should be able to vote, but instead whether an American citizen should ever lose the cherished right to vote in the first place.”
Despite common misconceptions, the current landscape is checkered across red and blue states alike. In Alabama, Mississippi, and Alaska many people incarcerated for felonies can still vote. At a congressional hearing earlier this month, Alabama’s Republican Secretary of State touted his support for legislative reforms that make it easier for people to vote in prison. Uniformly, across the country, people who are jailed pre-conviction and those incarcerated for misdemeanors retain the right to vote, even if that detention lasts for years.
As Americans, we start with a presumption of the right to vote.
We also share an understanding that participation in elections is the most powerful tool in our democracy, so we should only strip someone of that right for a very good reason, presumably serving a criminal justice interest. Yet none of the commonly accepted goals of our criminal justice system – public safety, rehabilitation, or the desire to punish offenders – are served by disenfranchisement.
The professed public safety purpose is two-fold: restraining dangerous people and deterring future offenders. But keeping an incarcerated person from voting does not further restrain them; they are behind bars either way. As much value as we place on the right to vote, it is hard to believe that the threat of losing it would be enough to tip the scales for someone whose cost benefit analysis has brought them to the brink of breaking the law. Moreover, felony disenfranchisement laws vary dramatically by state and most people do not know whether a conviction disqualifies them until right after it happens.
Another commonly accepted goal of the criminal justice system is rehabilitation. The idea is to take someone who has broken the law and set them on a track to be a participative member of society. Studies show, however, that felony disenfranchisement not only fails to advance goals of rehabilitation, it actively undermines them. Restoring the right to vote is proven to lower recidivism rates and help with reintegration into society. For those who believe in rehabilitation as a meaningful rationale for imprisonment, surely what would follow is a desire to help people find value in full citizenship through civic participation as quickly as possible?
One answer to that question stems from a belief in the third common justification for the criminal justice system: the ‘people get what they deserve’ argument in favor of strict punishment. If someone cannot comply with the law, the thinking goes, they don’t deserve to participate in the process of making them. We generally do not think that all people who break the law are bad to the bone; that is why polling by Pew Research shows around seven-in-ten Americans favor granting voting access once people complete their sentences. This is consistent with the American value placed on second chances.
Moreover, there are very good reasons not to distinguish between certain convictions when it comes to fundamental rights. In a democracy, voters choose the politicians, not the other way around. But when politicians can determine what is and isn’t a crime, and also pick and choose which crimes take away the right to vote, it becomes reasonable to fear abuse of power. In fact, that kind of suppression is the open secret of the history of felony disenfranchisement. Many of the laws that strip people of their right to vote are rooted in Jim Crow and these policies continue to disproportionately harm communities of color. Alabama’s crimes of moral turpitude law, for example, was explicitly designed to exclude black people from voting. Even today in Alabama, a person convicted of stealing a TV would lose their right to vote, but when the Speaker of the House was convicted of embezzling public funds, he did not. During the Civil Rights Era, lawmakers again expanded the criminal code to imprison and attempt to silence their political enemies. This kind of manipulation has happened, and we should ensure that our laws prevent it from it happening again.
In a moment where there is rare bipartisan agreement that our criminal justice system must be reined in, we should be listening to, not silencing the voices of those most directly impacted. Several 2020 candidates, like Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, seem to be on the fence – not announcing a solid position on the issue. All candidates running for president should take the opportunity presented by Sanders to announce that they also believe democracy works best when every voice is heard.
--
The author of this piece, Blair Bowie, is an attorney with the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit organization that helps people with past convictions restore their voting rights.
Comments are closed on this story.