WireTap>Youth Activism>Youth Demand Voting Rights

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.

WireTap>Fighting to Stay

Fighting to Stay
Cambodian American youth are often caught between their parents' respect for authority and a growing number of lawmakers who want to see them sent -- often for the first time -- to Cambodia.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
April 14, 2005

Theary Voeul says her big brother, Sok, has always been a “really fun brother.” Every day, he would pick her up and dump her, giggling, on her bed, and challenge her to wrestling matches. They would go sledding in the winter and play football in the spring. He is also like a sister in some ways. “He has so much to say, gossip and stuff. He would talk about girls to me,” says Theary, 19.

Sok, 21, whose full name is Bunsok Cham Chhorm, was arrested when he was 19, following an incident where he fired an illegal handgun into the air. While out on bail, Sok stayed home and stayed out of trouble. He was a hardworking employee at a pool company, he joined an organization for Southeast Asian youth, and he helped the organization to paint colorful murals around town. So, when he went before the judge again, she could see he was trying. Instead of sending him to prison, she sentenced him to a three-year suspended sentence. “She didn’t want to lock him up,” recalls Theary. “She wanted him to go back to school, keep doing good.” But the judge had no control over the officers from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (formerly the INS), who were waiting to take Sok away.

Theary and her mom didn’t hear from him for weeks. They didn’t even know where he was until an immigration lawyer did them a favor and made some phone calls. They found out he is being held in a detention center in Louisiana, some 1600 miles from his home in Providence, Rhode Island, facing an order of deportation to Cambodia. Sok has never set foot in Cambodia – he was born in a refugee camp in Thailand before settling with his family in the US. He doesn’t speak Cambodian. In fact, ethnically, he is not even Cambodian. His family is from the Brao tribe, an ethnic minority from the highlands of Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand. Theary says being Brao will make Sok a target if he is sent back.

Sok is one of the 1200 to 1500 legal American residents who have been ordered deported to Cambodia, subject to ever-tightening laws regarding who may stay in the United States, and who must go.

The generation of Cambodians who were born in Southeast Asia and raised in the U.S. (often called the “1.5 generation”), who are now in their 20s and 30s, are subject to a unique set of circumstances. Whereas their children – even their younger siblings – were born here and are U.S. citizens, 1.5-ers are permanent residents, or green card holders. That is, they are here legally, but they are not citizens. They grew up first in refugee camps, then in poor urban neighborhoods, sharing homes with relatives or sponsors and negotiating a foreign language and foreign schools where they were made to feel like outcasts. “Think two or three people sharing a mattress in the worst part of town,” says Porthira Chhim, Director of Programs at Cambodian Community Development, based in Oakland, California.

The parents of the 1.5 generation, speaking little or no English and raised in Cambodian culture which teaches respect for authority, are largely deferent to the law and timid in the face of American bureaucracy. The older generation is also haunted by their experiences in Southeast Asia – by family members that were killed by the Khmer Rouge, by the time they might have spent in brutal “re-education camps,” by the villages where they grew up having been burned, razed, or bombed. As such, many suffer from alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder, and depression, which make them somewhat emotionally unavailable to their children. So, says Chhim, the 1.5-ers “gang together, out of survival, and the system punishes them for just trying to survive.” As a result, Cambodian young people are being deported in large numbers to a country that they fled for their lives before they were old enough to remember.

Chhim says this system amounts to a “criminalization of young people.” The good news is that young people are fighting back. Some of the same attributes that put them at risk for deportation – being part of the fabric of their communities here, not being intimidated by the system – make them excellent advocates. Youth-run organizations all over the country are working to stop deportation, and they have a long fight ahead of them.

It used to be that most permanent residents convicted of a deportable crime were entitled to a hearing, called a 212(c). At a 212(c), says Joren Lyons, Staff Attorney at the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco, “the judge would consider what age they immigrated here, where their family is, their employment history, their community ties, whether they were fluent in their home country’s language,” before issuing a deportation order. But two events changed that equation.

In 1996, Congress broadened the definition of an aggravated felony. Previously, aggravated felonies – felonies which are deportable – were limited to serious crimes such as murder or drug trafficking. With the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, the list of aggravated felonies grew to include anyone who serves more than a year in prison for theft or violent crime. Simultaneously, Congress decided that aggravated felons were no longer eligible for 212(c) hearings.

Under these new circumstances, says Lyons, it no longer matters whether your probation officer says you made every meeting, whether you’ve lived here since you were two, or whether what family you had in Cambodia has been killed. Without a 212(c), there was no forum to even explain these things. “Boom,” says Lyons. “Off you go.”

What’s more, these rules were retroactive. That is to say, it does not matter if you’ve committed a crime that is considered an aggravated felony under the new rules, but was not an aggravated felony when you committed it. You’re an aggravated felon now, and you’re eligible for deportation. The Washington DC-based Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, known as SEARAC, in a recent publication called “Concerns About the Deportation of Southeast Asians in the United States to Southeast Asia,” asserts that “some Southeast Asians in the U.S…pled guilty to charges before 1996 because they could not have known about the deportation consequences and because their lawyers encouraged them to plead guilty.”

Further, before 2002, accepting a deportation order in exchange for, say, a lesser sentence, would have made good practical sense because Cambodia and the United States did not have a repatriation agreement. In other words, the order was just an unenforceable piece of paper since the U.S. could not send people to a country that would not formally accept them. Then, in March of 2002, the US-Cambodia Repatriation Agreement was signed in Phnom Penh. Critics say the Cambodian government was “strong-armed” into signing the agreement. Three months after the agreement was signed, the first flight of deportees left for Cambodian.

Since that time, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement – known as ICE – reports that 127 residents of the U.S. have been deported to Cambodia. Sin Yen Ling, Staff Attorney with the New York-based Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, says most of her clients facing deportation are in their 20s and 30s. A survey of individuals facing deportation conducted by SEARAC in 2002 found that the average age of the detainees at the time they entered the U.S. was nine years old, and that the average time detainees have lived in the U.S. is 20 years. That is, more than half of their lives.

There have been some high-profile cases of people who were deported for minor crimes. For instance, earlier this year the Seattle-based newspaper, The International Examiner, ran a story about Sor Vann, a Houston man in his early 30s who was arrested for indecent exposure after urinating at the construction site where he worked. Indecent exposure is considered a crime of moral turpitude, which is deportable. After four years in detention, Vann, who fled the Khmer Rouge when he was 11 years old, was sent back to Cambodia. “Don’t pee in public,” read the Examiner headline. “Petty crimes can get immigrants deported.”

Certainly, to deport a refugee for such a minor infraction is outrageous. However, to be outraged only by stories like Vann’s is missing the point, says Porthira Chhim. Chhim says that we should be outraged by the fact of deportation itself, even if the people being deported did commit serious crimes. “We’re talking about the fundamental fairness of sending anyone who’s already served their time back,” says Chhim. “How different is someone…who came here when they were two, from a person who was born here?”

Opponents say deportation is especially galling because of the role the U.S. played in the displacement of Cambodian refugees. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. illegally dropped over 500,000 tons of bombs in Cambodia, targeting Vietcong army bases along the Vietnamese border. Simultaneously, President Nixon backed a coup by Cambodian General Lon Nol because of Nol’s opposition the North Vietnamese’s communist leadership. When the Khmer Rouge ultimately defeated Nol and came to power in 1975, they systematically targeted those people who were thought to have supported the U.S. Ultimately, about 1.5 million people – 20% of Cambodia’s population at the time – were killed or starved to death by the Khmer Rouge.

Sok’s father, Chhorm, watched his four sisters die under the Khmer Rouge. He was fleeing Cambodia and carrying his father on his back, when his father died.

His doctor thinks that those memories are why, when Chhorm fell off a ladder while working as a carpenter in Providence and hit his head, it all started to unravel. Chhorm thinks he hears himself on the radio. He thinks he is president of the United States. He stays up all night drinking and raving about the things he hears and sees. “We wouldn’t get any sleep,” recalls Theary, “and we’d have to go to school the next day. I think that’s one of the reasons my brother joined a gang and dropped out of school, so he’d have some place to be that was out of the house. Thank God I had a job,” says Theary, “because otherwise I’d be psychotic, too, listening to that all day.”

Sok was a member of the Cambodian Nasty Boys, or the CNB, one of Providence’s 15 or so Southeast Asian gangs. The gangs are often a source of violence, but just as often, they are a refuge where alienated youth who grew up as immigrants in poor neighborhoods can find comfort in each other’s shared experience. “We’re Asian,” says Theary. “There’s a lot of people that hates on Asian people, that look down on Asian people. Of course people are going to want to be with people who appreciate you, who got your back.” Theary doesn’t recall her big brother’s gang being violent or causing trouble. The night Sok got in trouble was “the first incident I’ve ever heard where it got that deep,” she says. “All my cousins was in it. They were just a hanging crew. They hung out in a garage.”

On the night that was to change Sok’s life forever, he and his friends got in a fight with members of another gang in nearby Fall River, Massachusetts. According to Theary, Sok and his friends were talking to some girls from Fall River, and the gang from Fall River didn’t like that. Kids from that gang were taunting Sok and his friends, circling around their car, knocking on their windows. Sok pulled out a gun and fired into the air as a warning. The other kids scattered, and Sok and his friends drove back home to Rhode Island. They were pulled over on the way back, and Sok was ultimately convicted of criminal possession of a firearm.

Theary is not pretending her brother, or others in his situation, are angels. “Yeah, they committed a crime,” she says. “But they didn’t learn that stuff in Cambodia. They were taught to be bad here. People around them [in Providence] taught them all this stuff.” That is, the circumstances of their lives in the country that they call home bred the kind of behavior that will ultimately cause that same country to kick them out.

Proponents of deportation say that the youth were given a chance, and they blew it. Paula Greenier, a public affairs officer with ICE, says, “These individuals pose a threat to our community. They have committed a criminal act that makes them subject to removal from the US.”

Many members of the older generation of Cambodian refugees agree. Sarath Suong, 24, was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and raised in Revere, Massachusetts, so it is with a deep personal knowledge when he says, “a lot of older folks say, ‘send them back, they’re criminals. They were given a chance.’” Sarath says that when the older generation came here, they expected to find the American dream. Many continue to cling to that expectation, even as they struggle. “Older folks say, ‘you work really hard, you make your money, you live your life’,” says Suong. “Deportation totally messes up their idea of what America is, what America offers us. Refugees don’t want to believe the American dream is a lie.”

As a result, young people are uniquely positioned to make a difference. “We understand how hard it is to grow up here. We understand the unfairness of it. We’re not scared of questioning the American dream, of being confrontational with the government.” As such, Suong was one of the founders of the Providence Youth Student Movement, a grass-roots, multiracial youth activist organization in Rhode Island.

The Providence Youth Student Movement, known as PrYSM, has done extensive outreach to the community about deportation. They organized several large-scale protests in front of the INS offices in 2002, when the deportations began.

Attorney Sin Yen Ling can’t say enough about how meaningful PrYSM’s outreach work has been. Ling has run legal clinics in Providence, Philadelphia, and Lowell, Massachusetts. In other cities, Ling said, she had trouble even locating people to attend her clinics. “In those communities, there is no sense that there are socioeconomic, political reasons why you’re in this particular situation. People facing deportation are living in silence, because they see it as shameful.” In Providence, on the other hand, Ling jokes that she “couldn’t get them to shut up!” She credits this openness, this need to communicate, with PrYSM’s education campaign.

PrYSM is part of a nationwide, grassroots movement working to address 2002’s repatriation agreement between the U.S. and Cambodia. The Southeast Asian Freedom Network has seven member organizations, in California, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and New York. Most of the organizations, such as the Oakland-based Asian Pacific Islander Youth Promoting Advocacy and Leadership, and the Long Beach, California-based Khmer Girls in Action, are youth-run. “It’s been the youth-led, youth-based organizations that have led the campaign against Cambodian repatriation,” says Ling. “It’s not really an issue of whether young people should or shouldn’t. They have to. They’re living this reality every day.”