"Those People in That Prison Can't Vote Me Out"
The Political Consequences of Racist Felony Disenfranchisement

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.
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