Researchers Register Voters in County Jails

(Image source)

Researchers like Christopher Uggen and Jeff Manza have documented the political impact of felony disenfranchisement, the ways in which voting restrictions strip away citizenship, civic engagement, and political participation from Black Americans.  But in our own decade-long research program in Midwestern county jails, we found that even where felony disenfranchisement laws had not stripped the incarcerated of their right to vote, most weren’t aware they still had the right to vote.

So, we decided to get the word out to those who eligible voters who might also be incarcerated. Earlier this year, our research team partnered with a local community organizing agency  to register citizens while they were incarcerated. As a result, we successfully enrolled 14% of minimum and medium security inmates in two county jails in the Kansas City area.

(Image source)

Ahead of registration deadlines for primary elections last June, we spent 5 days registering voters at the two jails. In late September, we returned and spent another 3 days registering voters ahead of the general election. Our process varied. For instance, in June, people signed up beforehand and were brought to us in a room in the jail in small groups. In September we were instead escorted to common areas within individual housing units, where we were announced by a corrections officer and were then allowed to mingle with inmates and complete registration materials. We don’t know how many people in the facilities were already registered or the number of those who were ineligible. However, we were given access to all units at the minimum and medium security levels and were allowed to speak with any interested inmate, except those in medical isolation or those held in solitary confinement.

 

PEOPLE IN MOST STATES CAN VOTE AFTER A FELONY

The good news is that in most states people can vote after completion of a felony conviction, though many don’t realize it. For example, Anthony Papa who completed his sentence for a conviction under the Rockefeller drug laws, recalls:

“I remember very clearly when I was released from prison and tried to vote and I was turned away.  I felt like I was second class citizen because I was powerless to help fix my south Bronx neighborhood that was deteriorating around me. I had to wait five years until I was off of parole in order to vote. When I was allowed to vote I felt complete and was fully welcomed back by society as a citizen.”

Aggressive sentencing for drug possession and sales over the past three decades has meant that felony disenfranchisement affects 6.1 million U.S. citizens, like Anthony Papa.

Still, many inmates still perceived their voting rights lost forever, even when that wasn’t true. It’s simply not true in Kansas and Missouri and 16 other states where voting rights are restored automatically following completion of a felony sentence. And the right to vote is not lost at all in Missouri and Kansas for those with convictions at less than felony level.  Unfortunately, misperceptions on this point are widespread, making the disenfranchisement of incarcerated persons in our states real even where it is not true.

Many of the inmates with whom we spoke at the jails believed they were ineligible to vote. Indeed, during the first round of registration in June, at one of the facilities we learned that some had been given wrong information even as they were signing up for our event by corrections officers who themselves misunderstood the laws. Lack of awareness about voter eligibility may run several layers deep. Our registration efforts thus meant signing up voters and educating citizens—inmates and jail staff alike—about the fact that in Kansas and Missouri past felony records do not affect voter eligibility. Most of the people we spoke didn’t realize that only four states in the U.S. bar voting after completion of a felony sentence. People in these states who have been impacted by policies are working to spread the word about what it means to permanently disenfranchise past felons.

 

DISENFRANCHISEMENT HITS COMMUNITIES OF COLOR HARDEST

The burden of disenfranchisement falls particularly heavily on Black and Latino citizens. One out of three Black Americans has lost the right to vote due to these laws, compared to 1 out of 56 non-Black voters. Loss of voting rights, however temporarily, is one of the many collateral consequences of policing and sentencing practices that disproportionately target Blacks in the U.S., acting in some sense as a new approach to racial gerrymandering.

 

(Image source)

In addition to felony disenfranchisement, Blacks face other barriers to full political participation. Missouri voters, for instance, will decide in November on a measure to amend the Missouri constitution to allow the legislature to pass laws requiring state-issued photo identification at polling places. Photo-ID voting laws, which generally require some form of state-issued (e.g., driver’s license, passport, state-issued ID) identification are in place in 32 states. Opponents of photo ID laws point to evidence that state-issued ID requirements to vote would effectively disenfranchise many older and low-income voters, with many arguing that the impacts of new voter restrictions are likely to be felt disproportionately by Black and Latino/a citizens. Courts recently ruling on similar laws in North Carolina and Texas have agreed with this implication, striking down voter ID requirements as racially discriminating in their effect.

Given the de facto disenfranchisement that occurs when citizens are misinformed about their rights, and the equally real threat to voter rights posed by current ballot measures, we were moved to reach out to potential voters in perhaps the most unlikely of settings, local jails. These efforts involved not only registering voters in advance of the primary and general elections, they included coordinating the delivery of absentee ballots for those who knew they’d still be locked up during both elections. We would underscore that our involvement was about registration, engagement, participation—not about specifically whom or what to vote for. However, to the extent that enlarging and enhancing the franchise is itself a partisan act these days, we plead guilty. In this, we were abetted by jail administrators and staff, who also recognized the importance of affirming all citizens in the exercise of their rights. We were further aided by an agency with deep roots in activism around racial justice and voting rights in our community.

 

(Early voters wait in long lines in Clark County, Nevada: Image source)

Racially motivated efforts to suppress the vote in this country are diverse in form and dismayingly frequent. Some efforts, like photo-ID measures, seem obvious; others, like the silence and misinformation around felony disenfranchisement, only slightly less so. For those who believe as we do in the importance of a broad franchise to a racially inclusive, democratic—indeed, a just—system, any efforts to restrict citizen access to the ballot must be met with action. We took an opportunity to use our familiarity with the jails to try to make a difference. We don’t know how many of those we registered will vote, although we requested and were granted contact information from most and will be evaluating outcomes post-election. But our purpose in sharing the experience here is to hopefully prompt others to look at their own networks, look for local openings for organizing and activism—for surely even the smallest, most piecemeal acts of justice-making can be fit to Dr. King’s prophetic arc.

 

 

~ This blog post was co-written by Megha Ramaswamy and Amanda Emerson.  Megha Ramaswamy is an Associate Professor at University of Kansas School of Medicine. She is trained as a sociologist and works as an applied public health researcher in county jails, designing, implementing and evaluating public health programming. Read more about her team’s work here and follow her on Twitter @Vaginographer.

Amanda Emerson is a PhD candidate in the School of Nursing at University of Missouri – Kansas City. Her research interests lie in creative, community-focused public health interventions to reduce health disparity. Amanda also has a PhD in English, her earlier scholarship focusing on the myth of equality in 18th– and 19th-century American literature.

Racial Pride is Can Help Protect Young People from Racism

(image source)

A new study conducted by Ming-Te Wang and James P. Huguley of the University of Pittsburg and Harvard University respectively, found that “racial socialization”— teaching and involving kids in activities that promote racial pride —helps to offset the discrimination and racial prejudices children face by the outside world.

 

brown pride

And, it’s not just relevant for young children in school. Teens and adolescents, including those who’ve been caught up in the criminal justice system, can also benefit from such an approach.

This new research by Wang and Huguley confirms research that I’ve conducted at Rikers Island over the last 15 years. I found that a focus on “racial pride” – teaching about historical antecedents to contemporary movements like #Black Lives Matter – offers a powerful shield against the discriminatory policies that result in the mass incarceration of black and brown bodies.

One of the key ways to help Black and Latino young men thrive is through racial pride. Focusing on racial pride may sound counterintuitive in a world in which a majority of young people in a recent poll said they thought their generation was “post-racial.” But my research with young men leaving jail and returning home suggests just the opposite. Embracing racial and ethnic pride can help these protect themselves in ways that really matter.

(image source)

What I, and a team of colleagues, offered through our study was a 30-hour educational program that served as a bridge between the young men’s time in jail and their return home. The eight sessions in the program focused on a range of topics, including the political economy of the drug war, gender and sexual relationships, and a session on racial and ethnic pride called, “My people, my pride/ Mi gente, mi orgulla.” Half of the 552 people in the 5-year study participated in the educational program, and the other half got the usual discharge plan from jail. The focus on these young men, in particular, was driven by the complex intersections of masculinity, race, criminal justice status, and health.

The idea for an intersectional approach to this work came from previous research with young African American women. Researchers Gina Wingood and Ralph DiClemente (Emory University) began doing similar work with young African American girls. In workshops designed to reduce their risk of HIV/STDs, instead of focusing exclusively on the biology of disease transmission, they included material on black feminist heroines, like Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells. Their results were promising. They found a significant drop in risk for young girls who participated in the workshops versus those who did not. And, they made a compelling case for interventions that explicitly took gender and power into account. We wanted to replicate their work with young men who had been unlucky enough to land in jail at Rikers Island.
Our results were similar. When we followed up with the young men in our study a year later, we found that those who had participated in the educational program spent fewer days in jail compared with those who didn’t. We also found that they had fewer problems with drug dependence. When the young men had higher levels of racial pride at the time of their incarceration, they were significantly less likely to be reincarcerated or be engaged in illegal activities even up to one year after release from jail compared to men with lower levels of racial pride. The same young men were less likely to endorse violence to resolve conflict.

Other research with young people who haven’t been caught up in the legal system confirms the importance of racial pride as a protective factor against discrimination. Survey research of 630 mixed-gender adolescents from middle class backgrounds in 2013 by Ming-Te Wang (University of Pittsburgh) and James P. Huguley (Harvard University) found racial pride to be the single most important factor in guarding against racial discrimination, and discovered it had a direct impact on the students’ grades, future goals, and cognitive engagement.

While we know that racial pride can be transformative, we also recognize its limitations. Racial pride is still no guarantee against death at the hands of the state or others, and the young men we worked with know this. When we piloted the workshop on ethnic pride, we showed the men photographs of civil rights leaders – Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King – and asked the young men what they thought when they saw these images. One telling response to the images: “These guys are cool, but they’re all dead.” This observation aside, most of the young men we encountered in jail had heard little in their traditional educational programs about what might make them proud of being African American or Latino, outside of limited “Black History Month” or “Hispanic Heritage” events. The young people we’ve met in jail are eager to learn about their history and taking pride in it made a difference for their lives.

(image source)

It has been heartening, against a backdrop of police-perpetrated racialized violence in the U.S. and the current election cycle, to watch young people take to the streets and convention floors to demand change. We know that racial pride can be a source of strength and resilience, and it’s certainly part of what is driving current social movements. The true test will be whether US society can tolerate such resilience.

 

~ Megha Ramaswamy is Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine and Public Health at University of Kansas School of Medicine. Dr. Ramaswamy’s current work addresses the social context of sexual health risk among incarcerated women and is funded by the National Institutes of Health (National Cancer Institute) and American Cancer Society. The work described in this post was also funded by the National Institutes of Health (National Institute on Drug Abuse).

Study: Racial pride can help protect young Black and Latino men

In the wake of the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, President Obama launched an initiative called My Brother’s Keeper to send the message the lives of young men of color matter.

One of the key ways to help Black and Latino young men thrive is through racial pride. This may sound counterintuitive in a world in which a majority of young people in a recent poll said they thought their generation was “post-racial.” Our research with young men leaving jail and returning home suggests just the opposite, that embracing racial and ethnic pride can really matter in ways that can help these young men protect themselves.

Based on our research in New York City jails in the last 15 years, we’ve found that workshops that focus on “racial pride” – teaching about historical antecedents to contemporary movements like #Black Lives Matter – offers a powerful shield against the discriminatory policies that result in the mass incarceration of black and brown bodies.

What we, and a team of colleagues, offered was a 30-hour educational program that served as a bridge between the young men’s time in jail and their return home.  The eight sessions focused on a range of topics, including the political economy of the drug war, gender and sexual relationships, and a session on racial and ethnic pride called, “My people, my pride/ Mi gente, mi orgulla.” Half of the 552 people in the 5-year study participated in the educational program, and the other half got the usual discharge plan from jail. The focus on these young men, in particular, was driven by the complex intersections of masculinity, race, criminal justice status, and health.

The idea for an intersectional approach to this work came from previous research with young women.  Researchers Gina Wingood and Ralph DiClemente (Emory University) began doing similar work with young African American girls. In workshops designed to reduce their risk of HIV/STDs, instead of focusing exclusively on the biology of disease transmission, they included material on black feminist heroines, like Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells.  Their results were promising.  They found a significant drop in risk for young girls who participated in the workshops versus those who did not. And, they made a compelling case for interventions that explicitly took gender and power into account. We wanted to replicate their work with young men who had been unlucky enough to land in jail at Rikers Island.

-Arte-USProductos-ArteGrande-MiorgulloG black_pride_rectangle_magnet

Our results were similar. When we followed up with the young men in our study a year later, we found that those who had participated in the educational program spent fewer days in jail compared with those who didn’t. We also found that they had fewer problems with drug dependence.  When the young men had higher levels of racial pride at the time of their incarceration, they were significantly less likely to be reincarcerated or be engaged in illegal activities even up to one year after release from jail compared to men with lower levels of racial pride. The same young men were less likely to endorse violence to resolve conflict.

Other research with young people who haven’t been caught up in the legal system confirms the importance of racial pride as a protective factor against discrimination. Survey research of 630 mixed-gender adolescents from middle class backgrounds in 2013 by Ming-Te Wang (University of Pittsburgh) and James P. Huguley (Harvard University) found racial pride to be the single most important factor in guarding against racial discrimination, and discovered it had a direct impact on the students’ grades, future goals, and cognitive engagement.

While we know that racial pride can be transformative, we also recognize its limitations. Racial pride is still no guarantee against death at the hands of the state or others, and the young men we worked with know this. When we piloted the workshop on ethnic pride, we showed the men photographs of civil rights leaders – Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King – and asked the young men what they thought when they saw these images. One telling response to the images:  “These guys are cool, but they’re all dead.”  This observation aside, most of the young men we encountered in jail had heard little in their traditional educational programs about what might make them proud of being African American or Latino, outside of limited “Black History Month” or “Hispanic Heritage” events. The young people we’ve met in jail are eager to learn about their history and taking pride in it made a difference for their lives.

It has been heartening, against a backdrop of police-perpetrated racialized violence in the U.S., to watch young people take to the streets to let their voices be heard and join social movements that challenge this type of violence.  There is some evidence that lawmakers, prosecutors, and even President Obama continue to listen. We know that racial pride can be a source of strength and resilience but the true test is whether society can support such resilience.

 

 

~ Megha Ramaswamy and Jessie Daniels 

 

~ This post originally appeared on the LSE blog on American on Politics and Policy and is based on the paper ‘The Association of Ethnic Pride With Health and Social Outcomes Among Young Black and Latino Men After Release From Jail’, in Youth & Society.