It’s critical right now for political officials to get on the right side of the new suffrage movement. Just this week council member Robert White, announced the proposal of legislation that would reenfranchise incarcerated citizens residing in the District of Columbia, making D.C. the first jurisdiction in the country to reenfranchise incarcerated residents. White already has the support of more than half of the DC Council, so he is confident he can get his Restore the Vote Amendment Act of 2019 passed before the presidential primary. This is incredible progress for the Right2Vote campaign and I urge every political official to do with it takes from where they stand in legislative power to push the initiative for universal suffrage forward. We need to be calling out the hypocrisy of the land of the free stripping the rights of its incarcerated residents from participating in the legislation that governs their lives. There is no reason why someone who’s incarcerated shouldn’t have any sort of voice socially economically or politically and now the time has come to restore their political voices.
In 1955, Congress imposed a disenfranchisement law on the District that prohibited incarcerated men and women from voting. Similar laws like are currently implemented in 48 states as a tool to marginalize people of color with 1:13 African-Americans voting rights lost as a result in comparison to 1:56 non-Black voters. We see this reflected in D.C. which has the highest incarceration rate of any city in the United States with Black citizens as the overwhelming majority of the District’s incarcerated residents.
It’s exciting to see Washington D.C. join the list of regions to propose legislation for universal suffrage along with New Mexico, New Jersey and Massachusetts this year. As our nation’s capital, it would be massive for Washington DC to be the first region of our country to restore incarcerated citizens voting rights. The legislation that stripped these right was established many decades ago and now is the time to recognize that those choices were not for the benefit of the whole. The trend of public opinion as it relates to voting rights is steadily shifting towards approval with more and more citizens leaning in their favor of restoring incarcerated citizens voting rights. This is due to the understanding that disenfranchisement laws are rooted in racist Jim Crow politics.
Incarcerated citizens fighting for their right to vote has been successful in secure the voting rights of ex-felons in Florida, Nevada, Colorado and Missouri over the past year. Nationwide citizens and public officials are in agreement on expanding voting access to include former felons. This is because of the sacrificial work being done by activists on the inside. As more people are beginning to understand why voting rights were taken away from people in the first place the demand for inclusion grows. There was never a distinct connection between restricting someone’s access to influencing policy and incentivizing good behavior. In fact, we actually see the opposite occur, when we bar people from participating in civics we encourage them to commit crimes by pushing them on the margins of society. By making them feel like they don’t belong individuals are more likely to commit crimes against those who push them to the outskirts. We need to be doing all we can within this country to facilitate cohesion and unity.
The New Suffrage Movement Leading the Way for the Decarceration Era
Universal Suffrage for this impacted by incarceration is imperative following the Era of Mass Incarceration. Knowing that many citizens were unjustly arrested and imprisoned due to racist and overbearing ‘tough on crime’ legislation we must do all we can to restore the aspects of citizenship that were stripped from certain groups at an overwhelming rate in order to thwart their political power. We cannot be satisfied with a simple end of Mass Incarceration. We must push for a Decarceration era in the United States. We must organize in support of retroactive, non-divisive policies that reduce the number of incarcerated people and restore the wholeness of individuals in prison in the U.S. We must force Corrections Departments to recognize the humanity of their incarcerated populations with the passage of legislation like Councilmember White’s Restore the Vote Amendment Act of 2019 .
There’s something special about being able to cast your ballot, regardless of where you are in the process of serving your sentence. Being able to say that you have a voice is extremely rehabilitative. Understanding that our Department of Corrections are much too focused on punitive punishment, it’s time that we aim to restore the rehabilitative aspects of prison by showing prisoners that they do belong in our society and we value their voice and see them as capable of making educated and informed decisions. Even so, making educated and informed decision is not an eligibility requirement for voting. Hundreds of thousands of American citizens may be consider uneducated, ignorant or biased, but we don’t exclude them based upon that judgement because we value their citizenship. It is a basic human right of citizenship within a democracy to have access to the polls and we need to do the same for our incarcerated brothers and sisters.
