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16 states deny voting rights to incarcerated people, according to The Sentencing Project.
By Zora Lotton-Barker ’25
Staff Writer & Copy Editor
Everyone deserves the opportunity to have a hand in deciding who makes the policies that affect them.
Voter disenfranchisement should not be a tool wielded by governments to punish ex-convicts. Not only does disenfranchisement disincentivize incarcerated people who are coming out of prison because it reinforces the idea that they are not full citizens, but it aids the carceral punishment system by not allowing former prisoners to participate in democracy.
The Sentencing Project estimates that 5.17 million people in the United States were disenfranchised due to a felony conviction as of October 2020. Even so, states continue to deny the right to vote to citizens with a felony conviction. According to the Sentencing Project, four states deny people the right to vote both in prison and parole, 16 states deny voting rights to those in prison, on parole, and on probation and 11 states will not let people vote who are post-sentence as well as prison, parole and probation. Only two states, Maine and Vermont, have no restrictions, and 17 states apply disenfranchisement to prisoners only.
The Sentencing Project has compiled demographic statistics surrounding disenfranchised persons in the criminal justice system spanning from 1948 to 2020. When the data is broken down by race, it should be noted that Black people are more likely to be incarcerated than white people. The data by the Sentencing Project found that 16 African Americans of voting age are disenfranchised at a rate 3.7 times greater than that of non-African Americans, with over 6.2 percent of the adult African American population being unable to vote. Only 1.7 percent of the adult Non-African American population is disenfranchised. Their data also showed that over 2 percent of Latine adult Americans are barred from voting. It is clear that disparities in the groups of people who are most often incarcerated can be linked to disparities in political representation.
Roughly one fourth of disenfranchised people are currently incarcerated, according to data from the Sentencing Project. An estimated 4 million people who have been released from prison are disenfranchised, 1.3 million of whom are Black.
Disenfranchisement wasn’t created out of respect for the law — it was meant to destroy the power finally attained by newly freed enslaved people in the 19th century, as stated by the ACLU. During the Antebellum period, disenfranchisement was tied only to crimes believed to be disproportionately committed by Black people, according to the Global Policy Journal. The legacies of these practices are evidenced in the use of incarceration for minimal infractions or non-violent crimes like drug offenses. As The Sentencing Project observed, those affected by disenfranchisement are disproportionately minorities and low-income citizens, a voting group that trends democratic.
The government should instill power in the people rather than politicians. It is vital to hold those in power accountable to the people that they serve: not just people without a criminal record, but all people. The foundational right to vote is not just about rewarding good citizenship, and it shouldn’t be given out as the government sees fit. Voting is an inherent right that shouldn’t be attached to any conditions other than citizenship.
Proponents of felony disenfranchisement argue that felons must demonstrate respect for the law before gaining voting rights back, as reported by BallotPedia. The irony in that argument is that there is no system in place to allow for any sort of redemption.
Citizens seeking clemency have already served their sentences and are trying their best to reintegrate into society. And yet the mere failure to pay court fines can be used to justify the permanent denial of their right to vote, according to the American Bar Association. This sort of injustice renders them second-class citizens in their own country.
The current system of felony disenfranchisement might appear to some to be about preserving respect for the law, but this is simply not true. Felony disenfranchisement has nothing to do with the law and everything to do with politics. It is an excuse to deny voting rights, just like voter ID laws, literacy tests and poll taxes.
When a person is incarcerated, they serve the punishment that lawmakers have deemed fit for their crime. But when they re-enter society, they should not have to continue to face punishment for a crime for which they have already faced retribution. It is impossible to fix problems within the criminal justice system if there is no way for those who have been incarcerated to advocate for reform through voting. If these pervasive issues are not solved, the future of our nation is in serious jeopardy.