Chapter 1. ClickToRevealTest

YES.

As the U. S. prison population grows and the average prison sentence increases, the effect of laws disenfranchising felons becomes increasingly dramatic. As of November 2004, approximately 5.3 million Americans were disenfranchised-unable to vote-because of their status as convicted felons. It is time to eradicate these undemocratic laws and return the right to vote to people who have been convicted of crimes. When people are convicted of a felony and sentenced to prison, they do not relinquish their civil rights. Even in prison, convicted felons retain the right to free speech, the right to free exercise of religion, the right to due process of law, and the right to petition the courts for violations of their rights. These rights may be limited to achieve order and security in the prison environment, but the rights themselves remain intact. In a democracy, voting is a fundamental right. Indeed, the right to vote allows citizens to protect their other rights by placing a check on government power. Allowing convicted felons the right to vote poses no security risk in the prison context, so there is no legitimate reason to deprive convicted felons of this most basic right.

Moreover, allowing inmates to vote may serve an important penological interest: retaining the right to vote keeps incarcerated felons invested in civic life, allows them to retain ties to the community, and thus eases their transition after prison. At a minimum, the right to vote should be returned to felons when they are released from prison; paroled felons, probationers and felons who have been entirely released from supervision should be allowed to vote. Evidence suggests that felons who vote after leaving prison have a lower rate of recidivism-reoffending-than felons who do not vote. Specifically, sociologists Christopher Uggen and Jeff Manza followed a number of felons following their release from prison. They found that those who did not vote were twice as likely to be rearrested as those who did vote.

Disenfranchising felons may have substantive consequences, affecting the nature of who is elected to office and the types of policy decisions elected officials make. With respect to actual election outcomes, one study estimates that if ex-felons in Florida had been allowed to vote, even if only 15 percent had actually participated, AI Gore would have carried Florida by 40,000 votes and would have won the 2000 presidential election. With respect to policy choices, decisions about what acts to criminalize and how to punish offenders are inherently political, with winners and losers. Disenfranchising felons excludes the current "losers" from political discourse and entrenches the status quo.

Moreover, because minorities and people of lower socioeconomic status are disproportionately represented among the prison population, disenfranchising felons skews the demographics of who can vote, rendering our government significantly less representative. For example, of the 5.3 million disenfranchised felons in 2004, 2 million (37.7 percent) were African-American; according to U.S. Census figures, African-Americans comprised only 13.4 percent of the total U.s. population. Indeed, several former Confederate states passed laws disenfranchising felons as a specific measure to disenfranchise former slaves; the laws allowed racist law enforcement practices to have more systemic political consequences.

Felon disenfranchisement laws not only silence the voices of one portion of the population, but they also amplify the voices of another portion of the population. Specifically, when congressional districts are reapportioned following the U.S. Census, prison populations count, increasing the populations of the generally rural communities in which prisons are located. Because the felons count for reapportionment but cannot vote, the effect is to give residents of communities that house prisons a more significant voice in government; the ratio of eligible voters to representatives is lower in districts with prisons than in districts without prisons. As a result, felon disenfranchisement affects the fairness of the democratic process for all of us.

Disenfranchising felons runs counter to the very notion of popular sovereignty that undergirds our democratic process. WIllie brealcing the law amounts to violating the social contract and justifies the loss or curtailment of certain rights, it does not justify the loss of this most fundamental right in a democratic society: the right to vote. In the interest of preserving democratic ideals and promoting rehabilitation, felon disenfranchisement laws should be repealed.