KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE SPARROW :

A Growing Gap in American Democracy : Felony disenfranchisement, coupled with very high incarceration rates, has become a major challenge to our democratic values. (SASHA ABRAMSKY, July 27, 2002, NY Times)

On July 18, Judge James Lawrence King of the Federal District Court for the Southern District of Florida dismissed a lawsuit against Florida's disenfranchisement laws. [...]

The recent court decision neglected two important factors. The first is that Congress amended the Voting Rights Act in 1982 to remove "intent" as a necessary precondition for a finding of racial discrimination, and to replace it with a results-based test. A voting qualification that interacts with social conditions to cause an inequality in voting opportunities violates the Voting Rights Act. Because nonwhites are more likely to be arrested and convicted than whites, relative to their participation in criminal activity, felony disenfranchisement cannot but disproportionately affect African-American and Latino access to the ballot box.

The second neglected factor is that, since the 1974 ruling, America's prison population has quintupled. A recent study estimated that disenfranchisement laws now deprive as many as five million Americans of the right to vote. Numbers this large really matter. At the last election, if even a small proportion of Florida's disenfranchised population had voted, and if they had broken 60-40 in Al Gore's favor - a highly conservative estimate given the demographics of this group - George Bush would not have won an Electoral College majority. Felony disenfranchisement, coupled with very high incarceration rates, has become a major challenge to our democratic values. In a self-confident democracy, such laws simply have no place. The Brennan Center is appealing Judge King's decision. Meanwhile, state legislators must speedily abolish these vestiges of Jim Crow.

The problem with this argument is obvious enough. Jim Crow punished blacks for being black, something over which they had no control and which there is no need or justification for sanctioning. Black felons are being punished for being felons, something over which they had complete control and for which they deserve sanction.
Posted by Orrin Judd at July 28, 2002 8:37 AM