Imagine that you are a 38 year old man who runs a non-profit business helping homeless families find homes, get jobs, and give them new opportunities. You have been given multiple awards and have been recognized for your hard and noble work. Somehow, you find time to balance your work life with a spouse and four kids. People use you to describe what an outstanding citizen should look like, but there is one little issue: you are not allowed to vote. Why are you not allowed to vote? Because when you were nineteen, you got caught with the possession of marijuana. Now people think it is silly that you got arrested for marijuana– especially since it is legal now– but due to mandatory sentencing and prehistoric laws, you can never be allowed to vote. This story of felony disenfranchisement has become increasingly popular over the past decades. The question now has become: Should ex-felons be allowed to vote? And if yes, when should this right be granted? Throughout the essay, the historic context of these laws and how the prison system has evolved to what it is today will be explored, the statistics of who is being arrested, and if it is having any impact on our democratic system.
First, the history of disproportionate impacts began at the end of the Civil War. The Thirteenth Amendment states: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted should exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” What this means is that although slavery itself is outlawed, the amendment has created an exception by allowing states to impose those who were convicted into involuntary servitude (Blackmon). Considering the South’s crumbling economy, politicians reaped the opportunity and swiftly created more criminal laws. Furthermore, these laws were “essentially intended to criminalize black life” (Blackmon) and selectively enforced by a nearly all-white criminal justice system (Brennan Center for Justice). Eventually becoming known as Black Codes, convict leasing became the supplier of cheap labor with at least 90 percent being black. Soon after, the Fourteenth Amendment was passed and stated: “But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.” This essentially revokes the right to vote from felons. Edward Burmila formed a theory which holds that the potential voters who do not regularly vote in modern US elections are lower in socioeconomic status and often African-American or Latino. This is crucial since these voters are statistically more likely to vote for more liberal Democratic candidates who support a social welfare state benefitting voters of lower socioeconomic status. Furthermore, democrats favor expansive measures such as extended early voting and the reinstatement of voting rights to ex-felons, where as Republicans favor the restrictive measures and disenfranchisement of felons. Burmilla concluded that not only is this a way of reinstating slavery as well as Republicans decreasing the “risk” of a populist movement from poor whites or people of color. Thus, they are keeping maintaining their power.
This issue remains untouched until the 1980s when the U.S. began its “tough on crime” era. We begin to see a series of law enforcement and sentencing policy changes which resulted in a dramatic growth in incarceration. Kilgore found that from 1980 to 2013, the number of people in prisons and jails rose from just over five hundred thousand to more than two million, reaching a peak in 2009 at about 2.5 million. With only five percent of the world’s population, the US holds 25% of the world’s prisoners. Among industrialized nations, the US is an outlier due to the incarceration rate being more than four times the rate of Britain and China and more than fourteen times the rate of Japan. But how did this come to be? Nixon was the first key advocate of how law and order should be and declared a war against “criminal elements”. He promoted the goal of a higher conviction rate as central to a reduction of crime levels, and during his presidency the federal government’s law enforcement budget tripled (growing from $60 million to almost $800 million). His approach failed to reduce crime rates, which continued to escalate during his presidency and by 1970 had more than doubled for the decade. During his last three years in office, violent crimes rose significantly; in fact, they reached new high records each year. Nixon’s response to this data was rather blunt, “you have to face the fact that the whole problem is the blacks.” The next key player is Reagan who began linking the harsh punishment of “offenders” to a broader political agenda of conservative values laced with patriotic rhetoric. The number of people in American prisons doubled within his presidency. During Reagan’s final year, he got the House to pass his Anti-Drug Abuse Act which expanded the use of the death penalty in drug cases and added a five-year mandatory minimum prison sentence for possession of cocaine base. This drastically escalated the war on crime and framed drug use as an attack on American tradition. Finally, a democrat took over the presidency, but Bill Clinton fell into this fear campaign. Clinton created the three-strikes law and increased the funding of prisons to about $57 billion. The racist roots of this movement could not have become any more clearer until the 1988 presidential election. Willie Horton became the most powerful media symbol of the criminal black male. The backstory was that Horton was a young man serving a life sentence, and he had received several weekend furloughs from the prison in Massachusetts. One weekend Horton embarked on a crime spree which included the rape and robbery of a white woman. Michael Dukakis was the current governor of Massachusetts and had supported the program that led to Horton’s release. When he became the Democratic presidential candidate, George H.W. Bush capitalized on the Horton story and radicalized the fears of white voters. Images of Horton were everywhere, and a CBS News poll showed that Willie Horton ads had more impact than any other commercials aired during the campaign. These ads helped Bush gain the reputation of being “tough on crime” and gave him the 17-points he needed to overcome Dukakis and win the election.
Not long after, mandatory minimums began to play a key role in increasing the prison population in the US. These minimums generally caused convicts to stay much longer than previous sentencing laws, and moreover, these laws have led to major changes in the way criminal justice functions.