[Mb-civic] Where are voting rights for ex-felons? - Derrick Z. Jackson - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Where are voting rights for ex-felons?

By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist  |  November 16, 2005

AS WE claim to be spreading democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, we 
continue to deny full voting rights at home. This week the Supreme Court 
refused to hear a challenge to the Florida law that bars felons who have 
served their time from voting.

The law goes back to 1868 when white political forces did everything 
they could to block freed slaves from voting during Reconstruction. A 
class-action challenge to the law was filed on behalf of 600,000 former 
felons in Florida just before the bitter 2000 presidential election, one 
marred by bitter claims of hundreds of black people mistakenly purged 
from voter rolls in Florida, many of them because they were listed as 
felons.

President Bush was handed the presidency by the high court, which froze 
the Florida recount with Bush holding a 537-vote lead.

The state of Florida argued that it modernized the law in the 1960s in 
such a way that it had no ties to the racism of 1868 and said that 
felons today can appeal for clemency to restore their vote.

A lawyer for the ex-felons, Catherine Weiss, saw it much differently. 
''The court not only missed an opportunity to right a great historic 
injustice, it has shut the courthouse door in the face of hundreds of 
thousands of disenfranchised citizens," she said.

The court not only missed an opportunity, it reaffirmed an American 
hypocrisy. We are a nation that claims you are innocent until proven 
guilty, but the high court lets states declare you guilty forever.

Fortunately, most states have now rescinded permanent bans on voting by 
ex-felons.

Only Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia, which all happen to be former 
Confederate states, cling to lifetime bans that can only be changed 
through individual appeals.

But for even three states to have the ban risks tipping the hand of 
democracy, especially when the disenfranchised people with prison 
records may be majority white but disproportionately black. No one knows 
where we would be at this moment if all ex-felons had the right to vote 
in Florida in 2000.

The high court's latest statement of disinterest in ex-prisoner rights 
comes as the Sentencing Project, the nation's think-tank that believes 
America has abused incarceration as a solution to crime, is publishing a 
report this week that finds that the nation continues to incarcerate 
people despite dramatic drops in violent crime.

The report, using federal statistics, found that violent crime and 
property crime have declined by 33 percent and 23 percent, respectively, 
since 1994. But incarceration rates since 1994 shot up in 24 percent. 
Some get-tough-on-crime proponents use such simple figures to claim 
their policies work.

The Sentencing Project looked beneath the surface to find something 
else. It found that from 1991-1998, states that were below the average 
national rate of incarceration saw crime decrease by 17 percent. States 
that were above the national rate of incarceration saw crime decrease by 
only 13 percent. That means there are factors much more complex than 
just throwing away the key that account for drops in crime, such as an 
improved economy, church organizing, and community policing.

With the declines in violent crime, the jails are being filled with 
nonviolent offenders, most of whom would be better served by education, 
rehabilitation, and maintaining connections with families than being 
isolated and being taught how to become more mean.

The number of drug offenders in jails and prisons has grown eleven-fold 
since 1980 to 450,000. The imbalance has reached unconscionable levels. 
In federal prisons, only 13 percent of inmates are there for violent 
crimes compared with 55 percent who are there for drug offenses. In 
1980, only 25 percent of federal inmates were drug offenders.

In a system in which the prison-building boom of the 1990s demands fresh 
inmates, the percentage of low-level street sellers and couriers -- who 
are often under severe threats of intimidation -- shot up dramatically. 
Even though Americans use illegal drugs at roughly the same percentage 
as their racial group, African-Americans and Latinos -- because they 
have been easier to sweep off the streets than a suburban white coke 
snorter behind a fenced-in lawn -- remain vastly overrepresented in the 
system.

Even though crime has gone down, the prison population has risen to 2.1 
million from 330,000 in 1972.

Even though felons have served their time, the Supreme Court says 
Florida can still ban them from voting.

If you are to judge a nation by how it treats the lowest among us, the 
United States still refuses to take the highest road to democracy.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/11/16/where_are_voting_rights_for_ex_felons/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20051116/0d758ce8/attachment.htm