Civil death
Rosen, Ruth
IMAGINE A corporate executive who's been convicted of embezzlement. He serves his sentence and some years later, having paid his debt to society, leaves prison a free man. Now he's an...
...This is not just a criminal justice issue, but one of basic democracy...
...If, for example, a first-time offender pleads guilty to a single drug sale and is placed on probation, he or she can be permanently barred from voting...
...Few of us realize that ex-felons so commonly lose their right to vote...
...Depending on where he lives, he may never vote again...
...The bright side of Election 2000, however, is that it has ignited a spirited reconsideration of many of the arcane practices that shape our electoral process...
...These people have paid their debt to society," says Jamie Fellner, associate counsel at Human Rights Watch...
...The impact of such widespread disenfranchisement on our elections is staggering...
...In fact, the framers limited this right to free white men who owned property...
...Nor are we aware that any felony can trigger what some have called "civil death...
...But ever since, suffrage has been extended to those who were initially excluded: people without property, women, African-Americans, and people who are not literate...
...Or has he forfeited his right to participate in American democracy...
...As Andrew Shapiro, an attorney, notes, "An eighteen-yearold first-time offender who trades a guilty plea for a non-prison sentence may unwittingly sacrifice forever his right to vote...
...Fifty years after the beginnings of the civil rights movement, it is tragic that every day more black citizens lose their voting rights," says Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Washington D.C.-based Sentencing Project...
...In 1901, for example, Alabama lawmakers inserted a provision in the state constitution that disenfranchised any person guilty of the felonious crime of "moral turpitude...
...In part, this is a legacy of the South's successful post-Reconstruction effort to prevent freed slaves from voting...
...Should we allow him to vote...
...But afterward...
...The one group still excluded is convicted felons...
...Florida, for example, denies the vote to ex-felons who have fully served their sentence...
...They just may be the battle cry for the next struggle for suffrage...
...We are the heirs of that racist legacy...
...Now he's an ex-convict, in fact, an ex-felon...
...Approximately onethird of Florida's black men—some two hundred thousand residents—were legally prohibited from casting a vote...
...Thirty-two states disenfranchise them while on parole, twenty-nine while on probation...
...When a person has done time, he or she should be able to vote again, not after finishing parole, but upon leaving the prison grounds...
...I want to walk calmly into a polling place with other citizens, to carry my placid ballot into the booth, check off my choices, then drop my conscience in the common box...
...44 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 PLAN B "No other country in the world takes away the right to vote for life...
...Joe Loya, a disenfranchised ex-felon, expresses this sentiment even more eloquently: "Without a vote, a voice, I am a ghost inhabiting a citizen's space...
...In other words, absent these disenfranchisement laws, Gore would now be president...
...In the South, that could mean just staring at a white woman...
...According to New York-based Human Rights Watch, Florida law prevented more than four hundred thousand ex-felons from voting in the November election...
...This nation began with a stingy view of who was virtuous enough to cast a vote in elections...
...Thirteen percent of African-American men1.4 million people—are permanently disenfranchised because they are in prison, on parole or probation, or are ex-felons...
...DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 45...
...They are disproportionately black men...
...If the point of imprisonment is rehabilitation, how can we conclude that people should suffer civil death after they have been released from prison...
...The people most affected by these laws, as you might suspect, are not corporate executives...
...Thirteen states bar ex-felons—permanently— from voting...
...Listen to his words...
...Because the disenfranchisement of ex-felons disproportionately affects African-American men, many of whom are in prison for drug felonies, many blacks are rightfully angry that disenfranchisement laws rob them of their participation in the voting process...
...So far, though, the issue of how many people are disenfranchised because of their criminal pasts has not been highly publicized...
...Among African-Americans, the impact was dramatic...
...RUTH ROSEN, who teaches history at the University of California, Davis, and is an editorial writer at the San Francisco Chronicle, is the author of The World Split Open: How The Modern Women's Movement Changed America...
...I believe that an individual who is imprisoned for a felony should give up many civil rights, including that of suffrage...
...Between 1890 and 1910, southern states crafted their criminal disenfranchisement laws, along with other voting qualifications, with the goal of preventing African-Americans from voting...
...Human Rights Watch concludes: "Assuming the voting pattern of black ex-felons would have been similar to the vote by black residents in Florida generally, the inability of these ex-offenders to vote had a significant impact on the number voting for Vice President Gore...
...In most democratic countries, ex-felons are expected to re-enter society as citizens newly endowed with the rights and responsibilities they lost as legal outcasts...
...But in America, our legacy of slavery and Reconstruction still affects so many aspects of our democratic process—from the electoral college to poorly working voting machines in black districts...
...Nor did the legislators even bother to hide their goal, which they openly declared was to establish and preserve white supremacy...
Vol. 48 • April 2001 • No. 2
