Frank Negron is literally nobody to George W. Bush, John Kerry, George Pataki or Michael Bloomberg. Born in Spanish Harlem to a family of drug addicts and dealers who, during his youth, defined his entire worldview, his first drug conviction came in 1975 at the age of 15. In 1979 he entered Attica State Prison on further charges. After 22 hard years, he was paroled in 2001 a much older and wiser man, with a renewed interest in the American political process.
Yet, as a felon on parole, Frank Negron is not allowed to vote and will wait many years before he is "granted" the full rights of a citizen. He is nominally a citizen, but without a vote or a campaign contribution to offer a politician, he has been almost totally deprived of a voice.
Even as probably hundreds of Brown students and millions of Americans avoid the polls this November and grant victory to the candidate who inspires the least apathy, many thousands of others who want to make their voices heard will effectively be silenced. For eligible citizens like these, not voting is arguably in itself a political statement.
For other citizens, however, electoral nonparticipation is mandatory, and they are completely excluded from the activities that define active citizenry in a democratic society.
In many states, convicted felons who have served prison time, officially paid their debt to society and have been declared rehabilitated must endure a stressful and time-consuming bureaucratic nightmare in order to vote, often many years after their release. In most states, including Rhode Island, felons regain suffrage once they have completed their sentence, parole and probation.
While this may sound just, the reality is that even for relatively minor infractions, parole can stretch for years, sometimes even decades. An unlucky one-time drug user could potentially not vote for 20 years on account of one mistake. And then there are some states, such as Florida, where anyone convicted of a felony is permanently disenfranchised.
Most of the country would be unlikely to accept Maine's and Vermont's policy of allowing felons to vote while in prison. But to continue to abridge people's right to vote once they have been judged fit to return to normal life is to invalidate the function of prison as a vehicle of rehabilitation for felons.
Once someone has served his term, he is supposed to begin a new life as someone reintegrated into mainstream society, which becomes literally impossible when he is denied the vote.
While it might be difficult to summon sympathy for those felons - murderers, rapists, pedophiles, etc. - so often decried by our politicians, it is important to remember that many are actually in prison for non-violent crimes such as drug possession or writing bad checks, or due to the three-strikes policy designed to punish repeated misdemeanors. Nationwide, 21 percent of state and 57 percent of federal inmates have been convicted of drug-related felonies, some of which are for as little as an ounce of marijuana.
Our prison system is ostensibly designed to rehabilitate and educate people who use and/or abuse drugs. Restricting these people's rights when they have left prison and have become taxpaying citizens is profoundly hypocritical. If our society truly wants people to begin new, productive lives when their sentences are completed, then these citizens need direct access to the democratic process.
Disturbingly, disenfranchisement has a grossly disproportionate effect on minorities over others. 4.7 million Americans are disenfranchised, 1.4 of them permanently. Approximately 1.4 million black men are currently disenfranchised, representing 13 percent of the total black male population and making up 30 percent of the total disenfranchised, even though black men make up less than 7 percent of the population.
Despite similar rates of drug use, blacks are 13 times more likely to be convicted of drug charges than their white counterparts. The numbers are similar for people of Hispanic descent.
In Rhode Island, 20 percent of adult black men and 9 percent of adult Hispanic men are disenfranchised, compared to 2 percent of adult white men. Studies have found that states with higher non-white prison populations tend to limit felon voting rights more than others; indeed, the idea of felon disenfranchisement emerged in the post-Civil War era when states sought to limit the political power of recently emancipated slaves.
People who have historically enjoyed the least representation are thus further deprived of a voice, which perpetuates a cycle of political alienation and disaffection that ultimately leads to more crime.
Some would try to portray felon disenfranchisement as a fringe issue, but in reality it has already had historic consequences. George W. Bush carried Florida by only 537 votes, but over 800,000 voters, the majority of whom were minorities, were and remain disenfranchised under the hardest voter-restriction laws in the nation. In elections with such narrow victories, disenfranchisement becomes even more significant.
Jesse Adams '07 works with Brown Students for a Sensible Drug Policy, which is beginning a joint project with the Democrats' Legislative Committee to draw attention to this important issue. For more information, contact ssdp@brown.edu.
