Youth Demand Voting Rights, Regardless of Ex-Felon Status
Thanks to a proposition appearing on this week's ballot, Rhode Island may join a growing number of states slowly reversing voter disenfranchisement for former felons.
By Beth Schwartzapfel
November 3, 2006
Andres Idarraga dreams of one day becoming a literature professor. As a junior at Brown University majoring in Comparative Literature, Idarraga, 28, seems well on his way to achieving his goal.
Unlike most of his classmates, however, Idarraga arrived at Brown -- and his dreams -- via the Adult Correctional Institutes, Rhode Island's state prison, where he served six years for possession and distribution of cocaine and possession of a firearm. It was in prison that he began to read voraciously; books like Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom and a biography of Thurgood Marshall really stuck with him.
"These guys became like role models to me," he says. "They had this hunger to make a difference." So in the year prior to his release, he sent out his applications to college. When he got out, at 26, after securing a place to live and reuniting with his family, one of the first questions that Idarraga asked his parole officer was: "Can I vote?"
The answer, like that which has been given to some 5 million other Americans, was "no." Under current Rhode Island law, Idarraga will not be eligible to vote until he is 58 years old.
Like 31 other states, Rhode Island bars people with felony convictions from voting while they are incarcerated, on probation, and on parole. Five states bar ex-felons from voting during parole but not probation; in 11 states, some ex-felons lose their right to vote for life. Only Maine and Vermont permit inmates to vote. As more and more young people fill the U.S.'s already overcrowded prisons, stories like Idarraga's are becoming increasingly common.
"The criminal justice system targets young people," says Maggie Williams, Project Director of the Voter Enfranchisement Project in the Bronx, NY, Public Defender's Office. "They are the ones that get picked up. They are the ones getting arrested. A lot of young people feel like there is more of a chance that they are going to end up in prison than that they are going to complete high school."
The pattern may start with school Zero Tolerance policies that criminalize students while they are still in high school. Critics describe this phenomenon as the "school-to-prison pipeline." Indeed, the number of school suspensions has almost doubled in the last 30 years, from 1.7 million to 3.1 million annually, even as violent crime among youth has decreased, according to the NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund. In the 2003 book, Deconstructing the School to Prison Pipeline, Daniel Wald and Johanna Losen of the Harvard University Civil Rights Project wrote that 75 percent of those under age 18 who have been sentenced to adult prisons have not passed tenth grade.
Idarraga describes the phenomenon this way: "In some schools, the athletes are popular. In some schools, the smart kids are popular. In my high school, the bad kids are popular." Although he managed to graduate from high school, the job skill Idarraga had learned best there was dealing cocaine.
According to the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 41 percent of persons convicted of felonies in state courts are between the ages of 20 and 29, and seven percent are under 20. Taken together, these statistics indicate that almost half of all felony convictions nationwide are among people under thirty.
It is difficult to pin down exactly how many young people have been disenfranchised due to felony convictions. No analysis has been done to piece apart which states these young people live in, and therefore which laws they are subject to, but the vast majority of the current felony convicts in America under age 30 (the last BJS count, in 2002, indicated that number to be over half a million) will lose their right to vote for at least a period of time.
Critics say that disenfranchising people who have already served their sentences is tantamount to double punishment, and that engaging ex-felons in their rights and responsibilities as a citizen helps to re-integrate them back into their communities and prevent a return to illegal behavior. "People who are coming out of the system have paid their price," says Kara Gotsch of the Washington, DC-based Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization, which promotes reform in sentencing law and practice and alternatives to incarceration. "They deserve a second chance. That is equally so -- and probably even more important -- for young people, because they have an entire lifetime ahead of them."
Racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately impacted on both ends of the school-to-prison pipeline: according to the NAACP, while African-American students in the year 2000 made up only 17 percent of the overall youth population, they account for 34 percent of all school suspensions nationwide. Likewise, while only 16 percent of the overall youth population in 2003 were African-American, they accounted for 45 percent of juvenile arrests in that year. These statistics play themselves out in the voting booth. According to the Sentencing Project, 13 percent of African-American men nationwide are disenfranchised -- a rate that is seven times the national average.
"If you look at the incredible impact that the criminal justice system has on young, urban communities of color," says Williams of the Bronx Public Defenders Office, "and then you spiral that out and think about the implications in terms of civic participation, and the accountability of the political process to communities of color, we are setting up a very long-term pattern of communities not being engaged."
The tide may be turning, however.
Since 2000, six states -- Delaware, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Nevada, New Mexico, and Maryland -- have expanded the number of ex-felons who could vote, whereas only two states -- Massachusetts and New Hampshire states -- have passed laws that add to the restrictions of ex-felons' voting rights.
Most recently, in 2002, the Maryland legislature voted to restore voting rights automatically to most ex-felons three years after the completion of their sentences. In Florida, one of only three states which automatically bars all ex-felons from voting for life, Republican candidate Charlie Crist -- a former Florida attorney general and "tough on crime" state legislator -- recently joined Democratic candidate Jim David in supporting automatic restoration of voting rights to those who have completed their sentences.
Until this year, no state has ever posed directly to their electorate the question of whether ex-felons should be allowed to vote.
On Tuesday, voters in the Rhode Island district where Andres Idarraga would vote -- if he could -- will find him standing outside. Maybe he'll be handing out pamphlets. Maybe he'll be holding a sign. Maybe he'll simply strike up conversations. However he conveys it, his message will be: "Vote yes on 2." Proposition 2 asks voters whether they favor a constitutional amendment to restore the right to vote to people on probation and parole for a felony conviction. If it passes, 15,000 people -- Idarraga among them -- will win back their right to vote. Both the editorial pages of the New York Times and the right-leaning Providence Journal have both endorsed the measure.
"It's really quite unprecedented," says the Sentencing Project's Gotsch of Proposition 2.
In Rhode Island young people are disproportionately stripped of their right to vote. Young men are the most heavily disenfranchised group in the state, with 5 percent of men ages 18-34 unable to vote because of felony convictions. In neighborhoods with high rates of poverty, the numbers are tripled: 16 percent of young men in Providence's urban Southside cannot vote. Among young African-American men on the Southside, the number jumps to 40 percent.
"Youth from communities where many people have been to prison recognize that this isn't an outlier issue," says Daniel Schliefer, 24, field coordinator of the Rhode Island Right to Vote Campaign, which provides the organizational infrastructure to support Proposition 2. As such, young people are involved in the statewide campaign in huge numbers. According to Schliefer, fully two-thirds of the people working on the Rhode Island campaign are under 30. "Growing up in the shadow of the "get tough on crime" age," he says, this generation is in a position to reconsider the way society thinks about prisons and crime.
