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Civil Rights & Human Rights
On Election Day, nearly one million voting-age black men (more than one in eight) will not be eligible to cast ballots because of state laws that strip prison inmates of the right to vote, according to the Associated Press.
Disenfranchised black males account for 35 percent of Americans now barred from voting because of felony convictions. Two percent of all Americans, or 3.9 million people, have lost the right to vote, compared with 13 percent of adult black men.
State laws governing voter eligibility vary. Nine states impose a lifetime voting ban on convicted felons. In 32 states, felons can vote after serving their sentence and completing parole. States such as Massachusetts, Maine, Utah and Vermont have no prohibition and allow prisoners to vote. Massachusetts voters will act on a ballot measure in November that would deny prisoners of voting rights.
Clark Bestial, senior political analyst of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank in Washington, D.C. that researches policy issues concerning blacks and other minorities, said most Americans favor restoring voting rights to felons after they've served their time.
He also stated that no matter what race you are, once you serve your sentence to society, you should have your vote restored and if you don't have your vote restored, it's a life sentence.
A state-by-state breakdown of data from The Sentencing Project, a private group that favors sentencing reform, shows that in 17 states, the estimated percentage of disenfranchised black men is even higher than 13 percent.
According to The Sentencing Project, Allen Beck of the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics said that based on current rates of incarceration, 28.5 percent of black males will likely serve time in a state or federal prison for a felony conviction, a rate seven times higher than for white males.
Curtis Gans, director of the nonpartisan Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, said that he believes the figure is accurate.
Within the last four years, states such as California, Oklahoma, Texas, Washington and Oregon have imposed restrictions based on a felon's prior record or parole status.
In Florida and Alabama, for instance, the figure is 31 percent while in Mississippi it is 29 percent. In Virginia, 25 percent of otherwise eligible black men cannot vote. Those four states impose a lifetime ban on voting by felons. The other five states with lifetime bans are Iowa, Kentucky, Nevada, New Mexico and Wyoming.
After declining in the early 1970s, the prison population in the United States has grown dramatically. More than 2 million people were behind bars last year, according to the Justice Department.
Crime rates have been dropping since 1993, but longer sentences, especially for drug crimes and violent crimes, help account for higher prison populations with drug-related sentences falling disproportionately on blacks.
“Here we are, 50 years after the beginning of the civil rights movement, and we actually have an increasing number of African-Americans who are disenfranchised each year," said Bestial. “Unfortunately, our society may not see a change in the (prison) population any time soon.”
In Delaware, where Congress in June approved a bill that amends the state constitution to restore voting rights for some felons, proponents argued that barring felons from voting after they leave prison dates back to a time when only white, male landowners were allowed to cast ballots.
The new Delaware law grants voting rights to all those except murderers, sex offenders and those convicted of felony bribery. Felons there and in Pennsylvania must now wait five years after completing their sentence before seeking to restore their voting rights.
According to the Associated Press, the Rev. Jesse Jackson called disenfranchisement "taxation without representation," saying the issue goes to the heart of the civil rights movement, which fought for equal access to citizenship for all Americans.
Samuel Harper, a political science professor at Texas Southern University, said voting rights are likely irrelevant to most felons.
“Most of these ex-convicts don’t even know about what is happening in our society politically wise. Offering that carrot (voting rights) to them is not going to accomplish anything," he said.
This year, the percentage of African Americans in correctional institutions was higher than the percentage of blacks in the total population for the 29 states and the District of Columbia for which such census data is available.
In data released by the Sentencing Project last month for Texas, 68 percent of men between the ages of 18 and 64 in correctional institutions were African American. Blacks made up 27 percent of the state's total population in the same age group. This is also true for non-Hispanic whites in nearly every state. For example, non-Hispanic white men made up 29 percent of South Carolina inmates between 18 and 64. Non-Hispanic whites were 68 percent of all men between 18 and 45.
“I think the reason why there are more black men in jail than anyone else is because the law chooses us as their biggest targets,” stated former Huntsville prison inmate Dale Middleton, 37, who now resides in the Fifth Ward district. “Yeah, I deserved to pay for the things I did wrong, but if a white man did the very same thing, he may have gotten half my time.”
Middleton also added that ex-prison inmates are not inferior people and they should have the same voting rights as everyone else. Many victims' advocates, however, say felons, especially those convicted of violent crimes, should lose their right to vote.
© Copyright World Internet News 2006-07
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