By Elisabeth Seiple
In the United States, 1 in 13 African-Americans have lost their voting rights1 because of felony disenfranchisement laws. This, compared to 1 in 56 non-Black voters1 who’ve lost their right to vote, makes the racial inequality of felon disenfranchisement painfully clear.
“Civil death” has its origins as criminal punishment in Ancient Greece. At the time, the punishment only applied to to those who had voting rights to begin with, elite men. The practice then carried into the rest of Europe, and sailed into America on British ships. Earlier versions of “Civil Death” included loss of property and sentences to the outskirts of society. These laws are, for the most part, under States Authority, which creates a wide variety of potential repercussions. 48 states and D.C., prohibit those incarcerated for felonies from voting. Only two states, Maine and Vermont, continue to allow inmates to vote. Four states permanently disenfranchise felons, even after parole and/or probation. The most important and lasting legacy of these laws is their racist intent. In Brent Staples article for The New York Times, The Racist Origins of Felon Disenfranchisement, Staples illustrates the true history of modern disenfranchisement:
“Poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses and cross burnings were effective weapons in this campaign. But statutes that allowed correctional systems to arbitrarily and permanently strip large numbers of people of the right to vote were a particularly potent tool in the campaign to undercut African-American political power…The history of disenfranchisement was laid out in a fascinating 2003 study by Angela Behrens, Christopher Uggen and Jeff Manza. They found that state felony bans exploded in number during the late 1860s and 1870s, particularly in the wake of the Fifteenth Amendment, which ostensibly guaranteed black Americans the right to vote”.
This study found that “the larger the state’s black population, the more likely the state was to pass the most stringent laws that permanently denied people convicted of crimes the right to vote”. Herein lies the explanation for why Maine and Vermont, with a Black population of 1.1% and 1.3% respectively, have no disenfranchisement laws. States abuse the already in place historical notions of criminal disenfranchisement from antiquity, by forming them into a combination of laws with the direct intention of disenfranchising and taking any power away from Black voters.
With all this history, it’s shocking to think that these laws haven’t come into question sooner. There is no denying the laws unfairly target the rights of African Americans. So, are there any movements to combat these discriminatory laws? The Sentencing Project works on a wide variety of issues, mass incarceration, disenfranchisement, and drug charges. Florida has recently made steps to repeal some forms of felon disenfranchisement. Even so, felon disenfranchisement remains widely unaddressed and ignored. The United States has the world’s highest incarceration rate, and is the only democracy to have such stringent disenfranchisement laws in place. In this past election alone, 1.4 million Black men, more than one in eight, were unable to vote due to felon disenfranchisement. These laws, with their sweeping removal of rights, come as an incredible threat to American democracy and the ideas of liberty and freedom it attempts to portray.
Sources:
- The Sentencing Project, https://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/
- https://felonvoting.procon.org/view.timeline.php?timelineID=000016
- Staples, Brent. “The Racist Origins of Felon Disenfranchisement.” The New York
Times, 18 Nov. 2014,
www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/opinion/the-racist-origins-of-felon-disenfranchisement.html.
- “Study: Non-Voting Felons Increasing.” ABC News, ABC News Network,
abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=121724.