According to the non-profit research group The Sentencing Project, an estimated 5.8 million Americans are barred from voting because of a felony conviction, nearly half of whom have completed their sentences. This number has increased dramatically over the past four decades or so—not necessarily because the disenfranchisement policies have gotten stricter, but merely because the number of people involved in the criminal justice system has grown.
The group’s research also looked into the impact of these polices on minorities in the U.S., finding that “one of every 40 adults is disenfranchised nationally, but among African Americans the figure is one of every 13.” In three states with the strictest disenfranchisement policies (Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia), more than one in five African Americans are barred from ever voting.
While appearing at a civil rights conference last week, Attorney General Eric Holder gave a speech about, among other things, the disproportionate burden of voter disenfranchisement of felons felt by minorities. He placed the current policies in their proper historical context, starting as they did in post-Reconstruction Southern states that “enacted disenfranchisement schemes to specifically target African Americans and diminish the electoral strength of newly-freed populations.” By 1890, Holder said, 90 percent of the prison population in the South was black. Today, every stage of the criminal justice process in the U.S., from arrest to imprisonment, is disproportionately experienced by people of color.
Holder specifically called for the rights restoration for people who have completed their sentence,” Porter says. “In theory, that’s a good place to start, but there are hundreds of thousands of individuals who are living in the community, and who may be living in the community under supervision for the rest of their lives, who, depending on where they live, may be disenfranchised for the entire time…. They should have the ability to participate in our democracy.”
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Should Americans be barred from voting because of a felony conviction? Why/Why not?