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This chapter discusses the paradoxical ways that the Civil War served to strengthen states’ rights. Abolition was countered in many states by the enactment of “the Black Codes”, undermining the voting rights and equal protection that had ostensibly been granted to newly freed slaves. The author argues that these developments affect American life to this day, in the forms of felon disenfranchisement and discrimination, and in instances of denial of equal justice under law, such as the 1973 Rodriguez case.

Chapters 1 and 2 endeavored to describe and analyze the origins of modern felon disenfranchisement laws, as well as highlight the peculiarities of the American case. This chapter now asks who these disenfranchised citizens are. How many are there? How and when are their rights restricted? When are they restored? And do the laws have a disproportionate racial impact today?

This chapter analyzes the sources of rising rates of felon disenfranchisement and outlines some explanations for the growth of American correctional populations. The largest part of this growth is due to larger changes in the criminal justice system. The chapter explores the contours of growing rates of punishment in America, and notes how the nation's policies are remarkably out of step with the rest of the world. Perhaps surprisingly, this has not always been the case. Incarceration rates in the United States were quite stable for most of the twentieth century. It has only been in the final quarter of the century that dramatic changes have taken place, with incarceration and conviction rates skyrocketing in a short span of time.

The survey results described in Chapter 5 provide useful information about the political orientations of people who have had contact with the criminal justice system. Yet those results also suggest new questions: why offenders hold the political views they do, and how those views are driven by underlying values or dispositions, how they are not well captured by a survey instrument (however well designed). This chapter begins to address these issues using information from in-depth interviews. These interviews allow felons to articulate their views within their own frames rather than those provided by survey questions. Respondents were asked questions such as the following: What kinds of political experiences have you had? Do you expect to participate in politics in the future? Are any political issues especially salient to you, and if so, why? How did losing the right to vote affect your ideas about being a part of a community, and about your government?

This chapter considers how many disenfranchised felons would participate nationally and how they would vote if they were eligible. It shows that a significant share of the disenfranchised felon population would vote if they were given the opportunity. To be sure, their turnout rates would fall far below those of the rest of the electorate. In presidential elections such as the 2000 or 2004 contests, about one-third, or over 1.5 million currently disenfranchised citizens, would have participated if they had been eligible. In light of the conservative assumptions of the models used, it seems more likely that this figure is too low than that it is too high. Under any circumstance, it represents the loss of a very large number of voices and votes.

This chapter considers the impact of felon disenfranchisement on election outcomes. It begins with an overview of the implications of incomplete suffrage rights for democratic practice. It is particularly important to note that felon disenfranchisement constitutes an unusual issue in the post-Voting Rights Act era, in which the question of group impacts becomes a relevant consideration. There is considerable evidence that felon voting restrictions have had a demonstrable impact on national elections. In this sense, rising levels of felon disenfranchisement constitute a reversal of the universalization of the right to vote.

This chapter considers a range of policy and political proposals for reenfranchisement. It suggests that the key long-term reforms require reconsideration of all voting restrictions on disenfranchised felons. The issue can be broken down into three separate questions: restoring voting rights for people who have completed their entire sentence (ex-felons); restoring voting rights for people who remain under supervision of the criminal justice system on probation or parole, but live in their communities (nonincarcerated felons); and restoring voting rights for currently incarcerated felons.

This chapter begins by reviewing arguments that supporters of felon disenfranchisement have used to frame the public debate. But the contemporary arguments in support of felon disenfranchisement do not help us understand how these laws came into existence in the first place. We must instead look to the legal, political, and historical record to understand how we got to this point. The denial of political rights to criminal offenders can be found under very different types of democratic (and protodemocratic) regimes, and the practice has been a hot topic of philosophical debates since at least Aristotle. Understanding this history requires exploration of premodern political regimes and legal systems, classical philosophical writings, and their enduring traces in contemporary legal and political discourses. That is the goal of this chapter. But before exploring how and why societies disenfranchise, we must first ask why the right to vote became—and has remained—a bedrock of democratic governance.

This chapter develops a broad historical overview, subjecting race-based theories about the adoption and development of felon disenfranchisement laws to scrutiny. It develops a systematic quantitative analysis that uses detailed information on the social and political makeup of individual states over a long historical period to examine how various factors affect the adoption and extension of state disenfranchisement laws. Why is race a logical culprit in the search to explain the development of felon disenfranchisement laws? In recent years, there has been an explosion of scholarship by social scientists and historians fingering race, and racial politics, as principal sources of the peculiar development of American political and legal culture. This scholarship includes three distinct types of argument: firstly, arguments about the interaction between race and the development of U.S. political institutions; secondly, arguments focusing on the impact of racial attitudes and racism; and thirdly, arguments that stress the nexus between race (and class) in the political economy of the American South.

Researchers have turned their attention to prisoner reentry and reintegration as more and more people are released from prison and placed back into their communities each year. This scholarship details the problems that felons face in attempting to restart their lives, as well as the factors influencing whether they commit further crimes. Is voting one such factor? Does losing the right to vote matter to individual offenders, and if so, how and why? This chapter uses survey data to explore felons' political beliefs and the consequences of political exclusion for individual behavior and public safety. It looks at what felons believe, whether they vote, and how voting at one point in time influences the likelihood of subsequent criminal activity. If those who vote are actually less likely to commit new crimes—to “desist” from criminal activity—extending the franchise to felons could reduce rates of recidivism.

This chapter examines public attitudes toward disenfranchisement. It shows that there is little public support for stripping the right to vote from all people convicted of felonies. Instead, the public appears to view disenfranchisement as a harsh penalty in a democratic society with universal suffrage. The public endorses disenfranchisement for current prisoners, but “draws the line” at the prison gates. Strong public support for other political rights for criminal offenders is also noteworthy, including the right to speak freely even on controversial topics relating to the criminal justice system. This provides evidence for a degree of real depth in democratic sentiments among the American public.

This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to analyze and interpret felon disenfranchisement laws in the United States. It examines whether and how large-scale disenfranchisement impacts democratic processes; how racial factors might help to explain the origins and impacts of these laws; and the importance of the right to vote in weaving former offenders back into the social fabric. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter discusses the growing number of citizens who have criminal records and the ways in which those records are increasingly being openly shared with the public. It also reviews the evidence on how a criminal record affects an offender's right to vote, qualify for public assistance, find work, or retain his parental rights. The restrictions on employment and housing create formidable obstacles to law-abidingness. One has to question whether we are jeopardizing public safety by making it so difficult for released prisoners to succeed.

This chapter analyzes what happens to persons in two cases: the free person of property who commits a felony and undergoes civil death and the enslaved person, who, as bearer of “negative personhood,” has undergone social death. In most instances, though the person declared civilly dead has property to lose, the slave who never had property is property in fact, and can never have any independent relation to property. However, both of these characterizations possess juridical significance in so far as they recognize the individual as “a kind of civil ghost.” Rather than focus on the various and sometimes diffuse consequences of social marginalization, the chapter traces instead a developing logic in modern law. By the eighteenth century, Judeo-Christian antecedents and inchoate traditions of punishment were redrawn and fully articulated as a rationale appropriate to the needs of emerging modernity.

In this chapter, the author shares her thoughts about her parents, both of whom were convicted felons. At first she did not notice or understand her parents' wrongdoings. To her they looked normal. Her mother was an addict, but it was not noticeable because she kept herself well maintained. Her father got locked up for reckless endangerment and grand larceny, and her mother stopped keeping her drug addiction a secret. The author's grandparents became her mother and father. Over the years, her mother claimed she had had enough and turned herself in to the custody of Nassau County Correctional Facility on four different occassions. Perhaps this shows how much rehabilitation this prison had to offer. The author believes that all the problems with her mother and father had affected her and made her very antisocial; she definitely had difficulties opening up and building relationships with people. In her opinion, though, this was a small price to pay for the more valuable lessons she has learned. She is the daughter of incarcerated parents.

This chapter offers an account of how “figures” are discursively produced and socially fabricated through practices that sit between distinct but overlapping domains of power/knowledge. Through an extended reading of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and his 1975 lecture course, Abnormal, this chapter takes up the figures of the “delinquent” and the “convicted offender”–paradigmatic figures of the rehabilitative ideal in penology–demonstrating how they are fabricated to manage the tensions and contradictions between discursive spheres of justice and the penitentiary apparatus. This reading is extended to consider the figure of the felon, who, though the practice of disenfranchisement, should be understood as a similar fabrication, managing the tensions that emerge in the unacknowledged overlap between discourses of punishment and citizenship.