"People
In Prison Can't Vote Me Out"
By Paul Street, December 14, 2003
from
GuerillaFunk.com
In
a period of painfully close presidential elections, with the most dangerous
White House in history hoping to extend its criminal reign, every American
vote in 2004 is potentially a matter of life and death for masses of
people at home and abroad. It is exceedingly significant, therefore,
that 4.4 million Americans are disenfranchised due to a past or current
felony conviction. No other nation imprisons a larger share of its population
or marks so large a share of its population with the lifelong mark of
a serious (felony) criminal record. According to the best estimates
last year, 13 million Americans – fully 7 percent of the adult
population and an astonishing 12 percent of the adult male population
– possess felony records.
At
the same time, no other democratic nation denies the vote to a remotely
comparable share of its offender and ex-offender population. According
to Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, the leading academic authorities
on felon and ex-felon voting rights, "48 states disenfranchise
incarcerated felons, 37 states disenfranchise felony probationers or
parolees (or both), and 14 states additionally disenfranchise some or
all ex-felons who have completed their sentences." America’s
army of disenfranchised felons and ex-felons "are expected,"
note Manza and Uggen, "to respect the law (and indeed, are often
subject to significantly harsher penalties and face a higher level of
scrutiny, than non-felons). They are expected to pay taxes to the government,
and to be governed by elected officials. Yet they have no formal right
to participate in the selection of those officials or the public policies
that allocate government expenditures." Among those expenditures
we might include the hundreds of billions of dollars that American governments
spend on mass surveillance, arrest, detention, prosecution, incarceration,
and post-release criminal supervision.
Florida,
History and the Color of Felony Disenfranchisement
Anyone
who doubts the historical significance of this mass denial of basic
voting rights need only review the considerable literature, academic
and otherwise, that is now readily available on the dark and fateful
presidential selection of 2000. As scholars (Uggen and Manza) and journalists
(see the first chapter, titled “Jim Crow in Cyperspace”
in Greg Palast’s bestselling The Best Democracy Money Can Buy)
have shown beyond the shadow of reasonable doubt, Florida’s disenfranchisement
of felons and ex-felons was sufficient in and of itself to saddle America
and the world with the terrible Bush regime. But for that policy, Uggen
and Manza demonstrate, Al Gore would have picked up 60,000 additional
votes in Florida, home to 1,088,667 ex-felons and 293,396 current felons
in the fall of 2000. This was more than enough to have pre-empted the
subsequent melodramas over “hanging chads,” Jewish votes
for Buchanan, butterfly ballots, and the role of Ralph Nader’s
third-party candidacy. Also worth noting, as Greg Palast has shown,
the state of Jeb Bush and Kathleen Harris also disenfranchised many
thousands of other Floridians falsely suspected of possessing criminal
records by a Republican-connected, vote-scrubbing firm (Database Technologies,
a division of ChoicePoint) that failed to perform minimally adequate
fact-checking procedures.
Manza
and Uggen’s dark finding rests largely on the very disproportionately
black composition of America’s official criminal class within
and beyond Florida, a reflection of criminal justice disparities so
great that an astonishing one in three black adult males in the United
States carries a felony record. Manza and Uggen factor in and cross-match
all the relevant social-science inputs on race, socioeconomic status,
party identification, and voter turnout to show that felony disenfranchisement
was a wining tool for the Republican Party, consistent with broader
and related Republican efforts to minimize and dilute the heavily Democratic
weight and significance of the black vote. Anyone concerned about the
prospect of long-term Republican hegemony in the American Party system
should support the movement to extend the ballot to ex-felons –
a reform that is supported by 80 percent of Americans according to a
recent poll.
The
Policy-Driven Color of Felony Marking
Of
course, partisan consequences should hardly be the only concern. Elementary
considerations of fairness and forgiveness should leave no room for
the vicious practice of imposing medieval “civil death”
upon people who have broken society’s laws. At the same time,
those who think that losing one’s vote is an appropriate punishment
for violation of the “social contract” through criminal
behavior should consider the fact that the astonishing boom of America’s
prison, felon, and ex-felon numbers during the last 30 years is –
like felony disenfranchisement – a state policy. Contrary to the
"law and order" rhetoric cultivated by many politicians and
policymakers, there has been no clear or consistent pattern of rising
criminality, including violent criminality that can remotely explain
the simply remarkable off-the-charts expansion of America's racially
disparate prison, criminal supervision felon and ex-felon population
during the last three decades. The central factor is that imprisonment
and related felony-marking in the US have "changed," in Northwestern
University sociologist Devah Pager's words, "from a punishment
reserved for only the most heinous offenders to one extended to a much
greater range of crimes and much larger segment of the population."
People who committed nonviolent, especially drug crimes accounted for
more than three fourths of the nation's increase in prisoners between
1978 and 1996.
These
trends have impacted black communities with special harshness. While
blacks make up just 15 percent of illicit drug users, they account for
37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses. They comprise 42 percent
of those held in federal prison for drug charges and 62 percent of those
in state prisons. Blacks constituted more than 75 percent of the total
drug prisoners in America in one third of all states according to a
report issued in 2000 by the prestigious human rights organization Human
Rights Watch. Black crime rates have been consistently higher than the
white crime rate, consistent with blacks' lower socioeconomic status
and related higher stress levels and weaker social and familial structures,
but there has been no massive upsurge of black criminality that could
even remotely explain the skyrocketing black incarceration and felony
rates.
The
Three-Fifths Compromise Lives
There’s
more to the story of how the criminal justice system is working to reduce
African-American’s political power in the United States. One key
related issue relates to legislative redistricting in our geography-based
representative system of single-member districts and winner-take-all
elections. In a disturbing re-enactment of the notorious three-fifths
clause of the US Constitution, whereby 60 percent of the ante-bellum
South's non-voting and un-free (slave) black population counted towards
the congressional representation of Slave states, 21st century America’s
very disproportionately black and urban prisoners count towards the
political apportionment (representation) accorded to predominantly white
and rural communities that tend to host prisons in, say, “downstate”
Illinois or “upstate” New York. Thus, if a Chicagoan like
me takes a one-year position at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale
but maintains a residence on the predominantly black and Democratic
South Side of Chicago, I still contribute to the likelihood that Chicago
and the South Side will have a large number of state representatives
and Congresspersons. But if I get arrested and then sentenced to 2 years
in the Big Muddy correctional facility in very predominantly white far-southern,
Illinois, I'll count towards the political representation of whiter
and more Republican Southern Illinois.
To
get a sense of how this plays out in terms of racial political power,
consider some numbers from my own home state. The Chicago metropolitan
area is home to 83 percent of the state's African-Americans and point
of origin for 70 percent of the state's prisoners. Nearly two thirds
(64 percent) of the state's 45, 629 prisoners in 2001 were African-American,
a percentage more than four timers greater than blacks' share of Illinois'
population. Forty-four percent of the state's prisoners are African
Americans from Chicago’s Cook County. Eighteen of the twenty adult
correctional facilities constructed over the last two decades in Illinois
are located in counties that are disproportionately white for the state.
Just four of the state's twenty post-1980 prison towns have above-average
black populations for the state but in three of those this is only because
they get to report prisoners as part of their population. Five of the
six adult Illinois correctional centers constructed in the 1990s are
located in the southern third of the state. Visitors to such very visibly
white downstate towns as Ina, Illinois (home of the Big Muddy Correctional
Center), would be surprised to learn from the Census Bureau that that
community is 42 percent African-American and 90 percent male. The explanation,
of course, is mass incarceration.
It’s
not enough, apparently that each black prisoner is worth tens of thousands
of economic development dollars. According to distinguished criminologist
Todd Clear, writing in 1996, the prison boom fed by the rising “market”
of Black offenders is in fact a remarkable economic multiplier for communities
that are often far removed from urban minority concentrations. “Each
prisoner,” he found “represents as much as $25,000 in income
[annually] for the community in which the prison is located, not to
mention the value of constructing the prison facility in the first place.
This,” Clear says, amounts to “a massive transfer of value
[emphasis added].”
Part
of this “massive transfer,” it should be added, includes
state and federal funding allotments granted on the basis of census
counts, weighted to increase with the size of a jurisdiction’s
poverty population (and most prisoners are poor). An investigation by
The Chicago Reporter, an excellent local public affairs magazine, finds
that racially disparate mass incarceration’s interaction with
the geography of prison construction, political districting rules and
federal budgetary practices to cost Chicago’s Cook County nearly
$88 million in federal benefits between 2000 and 2010 (see Molly Dugan,
“Census Dollars Bring bounty to Prison Towns”). None of
that money redounds to the benefit of those who are responsible for
it, of course – the prisoners who do not get to drive on the improved
roads or enjoy the improved services built and provided with federal
and state grants that rise with mass imprisonment’s inflationary
impact on local and regional census counts.
All
of which provides some interesting context for a Chicago Tribune story
that bears the perverse title “Towns Put Dreams in Prisons.”
(Chicago Tribune, March 20, 2001, 2C:1). In “downstate”
Hoopeston, Illinois, the Tribune reported, there was “talk of
the mothballed canneries that once made this a boom town and whether
any of that bustling spirit might return if the Illinois Department
of Corrections comes to town.”
“You
don’t like to think about incarceration,” Hoopeston’s
Mayor told the Tribune, “but this is an opportunity for Hoopeston.
We’ve been plagued by plant closings.” The Hoopeston Mayor’s
willingness to enter the prison sweepstakes was validated by another
small town mayor, Andy Hutchens of Ina, Illinois. According to the Tribune,
in a passage that reminds us to include diversion of tax revenue among
the ways that mass incarceration steals wealth from the inner city:
Before
[Ina’s] prison was built, the city took in just $17,000 a year
in motor fuel tax revenue. Now the figure is more like $72,000. Last
year’s municipal budget appropriation was $380,000. More than
half of that money is prison revenue. Streets that were paved in chipped
gravel and oil for generations soon will all be covered in asphalt.
And $850,000 community center that doubles as a gym and computer lab
for the school across the street is being paid for with prison money,
Hutchens said. Because state and federal tax revenue is figured per
capita, a prison population that puts no strains on village services
is a permanent windfall for a little town such as Ina, Hutchens said.
“It really figures out this way. This little town of 450 people
is getting the tax money of a town of 2,700,” Hutchens told the
Tribune, and then added with a grin, “And those people in that
prison can’t vote me out of office.” [emphasis added]. The
same sort of developmental perversity is certainly underway in other
states, including New York, where 66% of a disproportionately black
state inmate population comes from New York City but 91 percent of prisoners
are housed in “upstate” prisons. Every single New York state
prison built since 1982 has been constructed in an “upstate”
community and 34 New York State Assembly districts are based in part
on prisoners (see Peter Wagner’s useful The Prison Index, Prison
Policy Initiative, 2003, pp. 38-39). According to a recent Prison Policy
Initiative study titled “Importing Constituents: Prison and Political
Clout in New York,” prisoners make up 7 percent of a recently
formed New York Assembly district belonging to New York Redistricting
Taskforce member Chris Ortloff. Of the nearly 6,000 black adults in
Ortloff’s district, 82.6 percent are barred by law from ever voting
for or against him because they are prisoners.
Money,
Politics and the Prison Industrial Complex
Of
course, many Americans don’t vote even though they possess the
right to do so. Probably the single biggest factor that keeps Americans
out of the ballot box is their all-too accurate perception that the
American policy and related candidate-selection processes are all about
Big Money lobbying and campaign contributions, so that wealth trumps
one-person one-vote in America, "the best money democracy can buy."
In
this regard it is politically as well as socio-economically relevant
that racially disparate mass incarceration and felony marking devastates
the earning capacity and wealth potential of black communities. That
negative economic impact – great enough for mass incarceration
to be discussed as a form of Reverse Racial Reparations – reduces
the black community's already poor ability to compete with whites in
the money-politics game of special interest influence, campaign finance,
lobbying, and public relations, etc. At the same time, of course, the
other side of the coin, taxpayer-funded mass incarceration is political
super-enfranchisement for others. It generates an enormous amount of
wealth for predominantly white prison communities and predominantly
white-owned corporations that build and serve prisons. Those special
interests, including the prison-guard unions, invest heavily in politics
as a down payment to encourage the expansion and preservation of policies
that generate a steady army of black and brown “offenders,”
the basic core human raw material for the lucrative and powerful prison
industrial complex.
Every
Vote Matters
None
of this is meant to downplay the significance of the “narrow”
issue of reforming election laws and procedures to enfranchise ex-offenders.
This is a huge, significant issue in and of itself. It is especially
crucial today, of course, in a time of close presidential elections,
with humanity endangered by a dark White House cabal that has attained
a position of previously unimaginable power on the backs of disenfranchised
felons and the victims of September 11, 2001. George W. Bush, Karl Rove,
Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Paul Wolfowitz and their ilk have seen
to it that every single vote counts, as it should in every election
in the "land of liberty."
Paul
Street (pstreet@cul-chicago.org)
is an urban social policy researcher in Chicago, Illinois. He writes
on class, race, imperialism and thought control. He is the author of
The Vicious Circle: Race, Prisons, and Community in Chicago, Illinois,
and the Nation (available online at www.cul-chicago.org).