The more we imprison, the less we vote

The more we imprison, the less we vote
By Conor Clarke and Greg Yothers May 5, 2008

FOR THE past 12 weeks, we have both been students in an Amherst College class on citizenship. Unlike most college courses, however, this one isn't held in a classroom. Each week, as part of the nationwide program Inside-Out, we meet for 2 1/2 hours in the dimly lit visiting room of the Hampshire County Correctional Facility. Half the students in the class are from the college; half are inmates at the facility.

It is a class on citizenship with a cruel irony: Because of a 2000 amendment to the Massachusetts constitution disenfranchising incarcerated felons, half the students in the class cannot vote. In about a week, all of the Amherst students will leave for the summer; many will volunteer for a presidential campaign. This November, like most adult citizens, they will walk to a local polling station or cast absentee ballots from the comfort of a college dorm. The students inside the facility can't.

American incarceration has received a lot of attention recently. Last month, The New York Times reported that one in every 100 American adults is in prison, the highest rate in the world by a wide margin, and about six times higher than the world median. This drive to incarcerate has been rightly and roundly criticized as too expensive (it costs more per capita to imprison than educate) and too harsh, since the vast majority of inmates are serving time for nonviolent crimes. But amid the controversy over price and punishment, it tends to be forgotten that incarceration imposes a cost on American democracy: The more we imprison, the less we vote.

Why should that be the case? In early 2000, before the amendment passed, Governor Paul Cellucci told Bryant Gumbel of CBS News that disenfranchisement was necessary to ensure that felons did not damage the political process. Cellucci said, after a group of Massachusetts prisoners tried to organize a political action committee in 1997, he "thought that this was a little bit ridiculous, that prisoners would actually politically organize and try to lobby against the very laws that put them in prison to protect the people of this state." The clear implication was that, once you've broken the social contract, you've proved yourself unfit for any social contact, including the right to vote.

But our experience in class suggests that the opposite is true. We all write the same papers, read the same material by John Locke and Alexis de Tocqueville, and are all equally engaged in debating and discussing everything from the role of the good citizen to America's role in the world. There is no reason to think inmates are uniquely unqualified to wield a vote, and no reason to think they can't.

Yes, going to prison necessarily entails the loss of liberty. But the right to vote is in many ways more important than the right to walk freely down the street: Voting is the most basic check against the coercive power of the state. The places where that coercive power is most starkly exercised, such as prisons, are also the places where that most basic of checks becomes more important. The fact that prisoners have a big stake in governmental choices isn't an argument in favor of disenfranchisement; it's an argument against.

And because the vote is so essential to democratic citizenship, it is also an important part of reintegrating inmates with society. Prisons separate and divide, but at their best they also prepare inmates for life after imprisonment. Rebuilding civic engagement is perhaps the most important part of that process.

There are more than 25,000 inmates in Massachusetts correctional facilities, and more than half are racial minorities. Almost all of them will, at some point in the future, exit their cells and return to their homes and families. It would be better if they returned as voting citizens.

Conor Clarke is an Amherst College student; Greg Yothers is an inmate at the Hampshire County Correctional Facility.

Source URL: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/05/05/the_more_we_imprison_the_less_we_vote/