Question 2 on Rhode Island’s ballot this November is a measure backed by the Right to Vote campaign that would allow for the enfranchisement of all felons once they have completed their prison term, eliminating the previous requirement that a person serve out his or her parole or probation before being allowed to vote. Opponents of Question 2 argue that it is undesirable as a society to have ex-felons voting so quickly. More broadly, the main criticisms of Question 2 and the Right to Vote campaign are that criminals represent a special class of citizens whose voting rights can justifiably be denied, that giving ex-felons the vote right out of prison would not necessarily encourage reintegration, and that the racial and social concerns that the Right to Vote campaign is founded upon have no basis in fact. While some proposals, such as reducing overly long probation sentences, hold water, the Right to Vote campaign goes too far in its correction of the problem, leading to a greater problem still.
“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.”
Thus, felon disenfranchisement has a strong constitutional basis. This clause was included in the Amendment for an obvious reason: it does not serve the interests of a democratic state to allow members of society whose actions destroy democratic order (criminals) to vote on important civic issues. Why should a murderer just released from prison have power in the electorate when important issues such as police enforcement are being considered? Felon disenfranchisement until the completion of probation or parole affords a democracy a rare opportunity to separate out the wheat from the chaff, the desirables from the undesirables. Other proposed options to achieve this effect in history have nearly always been dictatorial in nature, and thus illegitimate. In few situations is the choice so clear as to what option will result in a healthier state.
It is appropriate now to address a criticism of the probationary and parole system in Rhode Island which is indeed legitimate. Speaking with Dan Schleifer, who works for the Rhode Island Family Life Center in promotion of Right to Vote, I found that probation and parole sentences in Rhode Island are quite long relative toother states. Parole, of course, is a conditional release under intensive supervision, while probation is an earned release with less strict supervision than parole. According to Dan, Rhode Island has longer than average probation sentences, particularly for drug crimes, in which the upper probation limit can be around thirty years! There is a great deal of variance across probations, but in general they range from five to fifteen years for all crimes. When you consider the possibility that a young man who commits a minor drug offense at age eighteen might not be reenfranchised until he is forty-eight or more, it becomes clear that there is a lot of work to be done in adjusting probations to fit the crime committed. Murderers and rapists should, quite simply, lose the right forever. However, minor drug offenses should receive only a few years of probation before the vote is restored. These are reasonable proposals to correct imbalances in the system, but they preserve the system itself, for it serves a noble purpose.
This purpose is one of meaningful reintegration: opponents of Question 2 argue that withholding the right to vote until probation or parole is completed will give each ex-felon an incentive to reintegrate. According to them, if your goal is to have these individuals become productive members of society as quickly as possible, it does not make sense to give them everything at once, for then there are no incentives to move up from their prior position. Only those who are deemed worthy again should be allowed to cast their vote side by side with individuals who have not committed a serious crime in their lives.
What does the Right to Vote campaign think about this argument? Do they see providing the vote immediately out of prison as a good way to encourage reintegration, or is this just a cover-up for a blind emotional desire to extend the vote to everyone? My research convinces
me that the answer is the latter. I spoke with Ariel Werner ’09, Campus Coordinator of the Right to Vote campaign, first asking if she agreed with the idea that one of the main goals of her campaign is to foster reintegration. She agreed:
“I think, and I would say that everyone on the campaign would agree, that part of reentry is regaining your democratic right to be a politically affiliated citizen. Statistics have shown that. . . fifty percent of the people who vote are less likely to commit a second offense, which is huge in a place like Rhode Island where recidivism is a huge problem. . . .”
However, when I posited a hypothetical situation in which extending the right to vote did not encourage integration at all, but rather the opposite, she responded that even in such a situation, the inherent democratic importance of voting should trump reintegration concerns:
“Whether or not they become politically active and manifest [the right to vote], it’s [about] having the right to do so. Some of
these people will be thrilled and jump at their rights and others might say ‘it’s voting rights, not a big deal,’ just like people who haven’t committed crimes. . . .”
So, for proponents of Question 2, it appears that reintegration as a goal is absolutely trumped by a blind desire to reenfranchise felons.
If reintegration is secondary, what social concerns, in their intent, are more important than actual results for the Right to Vote campaign in its quest for criminal suffrage? A cursory review of the literature on the group’s website (www.restorethevote. org) shows that it all boils down to racial issues: minorities are incarcerated, and thus disenfranchised, at disproportionately high rates, and seeing such disparity makes some people mad – mad enough to gloss over all factual consideration of why the gap in incarceration exists and instead take the nuclear option of enfranchising everyone, right out of prison. The Right to Vote campaign does not stand on shaky ground in its supposed statistical justification for its racially and socially corrective policies, it stands on nothing at all. For example, a piece of Right to Vote campaign literature states:
“Indeed, a major study has found that felons who vote are nearly 50% less likely to recidivate than those who do not, as ‘Voting appears to be part of a package of prosocial behavior that is linked to desistance from crime.’”
Now, let’s give a nanosecond of consideration to this claim instead of just accepting its implication that “Voting is good because it encourages good behavior.” There is no reason to believe that voting encourages good behavior; it could very well be that good behavior encourages voting. All that has been proven here is a correlation, and correlation is not causation. As simple as the idea may sound, one can find this rule violated continually when viewing the materials on the Right to Vote website. Page after page show that yes, minorities are disenfranchised in greater numbers. But does this prove institutional racism? Absolutely not, for it is easy to envision that, perhaps, those same socioeconomic disadvantages that liberals attack so adamantly lead to – get this – a higher crime rate. A child who grows up in a neighborhood wracked by poverty and drugs will clearly be more likely to end up in the same place, and it just so happens that minorities, for any number of reasons, more frequently occupy such neighborhoods. In this case, the solution to promoting minority representation is to fund initiatives such as improved public schooling and youth leadership programs. A good first step would be to propose education vouchers, but that is a different discussion entirely.
In my interview with Ariel, I expressed my anger at seeing such a basic statistical law being violated repeatedly. I said that, at Brown, many believe that institutional racism exists on a massive scale, yet I had not to date seen any real proof. She directed me to a nice website, www.sentencingproject.org, claiming that it would clear up the causation issues I had been raising. I visited the site and reviewed their literature, initially impressed at the professionalism with which the research was supposedly conducted. As I dug deeper however, many
flaws surfaced. For instance, in one piece called “Racial Disparity In Sentencing: A Review of the Literature,” which was published
in January of 2005, the list of causations between the race of the offender and the sentence is initially impressive.
However, a few caveats throw it all off. First, as only a small note on one page of the site alludes, it is a statistically proven fact that hiring a private lawyer will reduce one’s average sentence. Because whites are wealthier as a group, they are far more likely to hire private lawyers, and will thus, as a group, tend to have shorter sentences. There is no institutional racism involved at all: what we are seeing is, quite simply, the effect of higher quality lawyers performing their jobs better. Again, it is unfortunate that blacks and Latinos are less wealthy on average, but this is the result of bad social welfare and education policies, and is a problem that is completely independent of the legal system. Even if the current economic disparity between races were caused entirely by “institutional racism,” it makes no sense to respond to this racism by unleashing known criminals on unsuspecting voting booths.
Second, the site’s literature plays with smoke and mirrors around the issue of repeat offenders. This is extremely important, as repeat offenders are quite often poor minorities, and because repeat offenders are subject to harsher punishments. Therefore, of course, what may look like harsher treatment is in fact a simple function of good crime policy. Will prisoners’ rights advocates ever clear this issue up? Unlikely, as such clear thinking and objective analysis tear their position to shreds.
Question 2 is a bad initiative, resting on unreasoning emotion, which in turn relies upon shoddy facts. Increasing minority representation is a worthy goal, and one which can be attained through social policies that will have beneficial effects that are a far cry from enlarging the electorate with rapists. In our collective efforts to fight injustice, we must be wary of solutions that are worse than the problems that they attempt to remedy.
