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The Truly Disfranchised: Felon Voting Rights and American Politic []

As incarceration levels have risen in the United States, an ever-larger number of citizens have temporarily or permanently lost the right to vote.

two counterfactual conditions: (1) whether removing disfranchisement laws would have altered the composition of the U.S. Senate; and, (2) whether applying contemporary rates of disfranchisement to prior presidential elections would have affected their outcomes

The right to vote is a basic right of citizenship in democratic societies, one which “makes all other political rights significant” (Piven and Cloward 1988, p. 3). Empirical research on democratic polities has established that the removal of the right to vote from a significant segment of the electorate after the franchise has been made universal is   exceedingly rare (although reversion of entire political systems from a democratic to a non-democratic order is a recurrent feature of the “waves of democracy” [Markoff 1996]).

The criminal code in most U.S. states, founded on the liberal legal model and Enlightenment conceptions of the social contract, generally imposes disfranchisement as a civil disability to convicted felons.

There are many implications of these rules barring felons from voting – for the citizenship rights of felons and ex-felons, for their rehabilitation and reintegration into their families and communities, and for their perceptions of the political system.

For a fifty-year period from the 1920s to the early 1970s, incarceration rates in the United States were remarkably stable, at around 110 prisoners per 100,000 people

Since the early 1970s, the number of people imprisoned has grown by over 500 percent (Mauer 1999, p. 1).

Ballot restrictions for felons and ex-felons were first adopted in the post- Reconstruction South as part of a larger strategy of disfranchising African Americans which included devices such as literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and “understanding clauses” (Kousser 1974).

Criminal disfranchisement was the most indirect of the various devices adopted to keep blacks from voting, but it is the only one that has survived to the present (Shapiro 1993, p. 538).

States outside the South also began adopting felon disfranchisement at the end of the 19 th    Century, and as of 1999, 47 of the 50 states bar felons – in many cases including those on probation or parole – from voting. 7

At least eleven of those states also bar ex-felons from voting, two more states permanently disfranchise recidivists, and two more states require a post-release waiting period. 8

Between 1972 and 1999 the number of state and federal prisoners in the United States grew by more than 500 percent, from less than 200,000 to over 1.3 million (U.S. Department of Justice 2000a; 1975).

2.8 million current felons were legally disfranchised on 12/31/98 or approximately half of the 5.7 million adults under correctional supervision (U.S. Department of Justice 1999

In 1992, for example, 26 percent of felony convictions resulted in a jail sentence (U.S. Department of Justice 1995