Researchers Register Voters in County Jails

• • voting rights

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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.

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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.

 

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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.

Research Brief: Reframing Race and Policing as a Public Health Issue

• • criminal justice

The policing and criminalization of Black men in America has several origins: the prison industrial complex, socially sanctioned lynching, stop and frisk, and zero tolerance, as Keon L. Gilbert and Rashawn Ray  point out in their recent article in Journal of Urban Health. This graphic illustrates some of the key ideas in their research.

Gilbert and Ray on race and policing as a public health issue

Download this infographic as a PDF.

Gilbert and Ray use a framework they refer to as Public Health Critical Race Praxis (PHCRP) to question how justifiable homicides affect Black men continue to occur with such alarming frequency. These researchers use PHCRP to argue that the excessive use of force applied to Black men during encounters with law enforcement should be seen as a public health challenge.  The PHCRP framework advocates for health equity with theories and methods drawn from critical race and public health scholarship. PHCRP has several principles based on its four focal areas:

  1. Contemporary patterns of racial relations
  2. Knowledge production
  3. Conceptualization and measurement
  4. Action

The authors question this legacy of policing in three substantial ways. First, racial stratification leads to unequal life chances due to the way current research criminalizes Black men of all ages. Second, criminalization of their race and gender limits health identity formation for Black men. Lastly, prejudice and racism lead to a negative experience for Black men within the criminal justice system.

PHCRP also provides principles that confirm inform policy aimed at correcting this legacy of policing in order to achieve health equity for Black men. This includes:

  1. The collection of data on death by legal intervention
  2. The repealing of stop and frisk laws nationwide
  3. The implementation of Community Review Boards
  4. The establishment of accessible mental and preventive health services

Thus, Gilbert and Ray use PHCRP to demonstrate how critical race theory offers solutions to build more equitable relations between law enforcement and the communities they serve.  Find more research on race and policing here.

~ Melissa Brown is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Maryland and social media manager for the Critical Race Initiative. 

 

 

 

Broken on All Sides: New Documentary about Race and Criminal Justice

• • criminal justice, digital video, documentary, new jim crow, racism

Matthew Pillischer has just completed a new documentary about race and criminal justice in that is worth checking out. Here’s a trailer for the film (6:58):

The film includes an interview with Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, which we’ve written about here before. While most third year law students are busy studying for the bar exam, Matthew Pillischer found time to produce and direct a documentary film about this important social justice issue. I don’t know how he did that, but I’m glad he did as his film promises to bring this important issue to a much wider audience.

Race and the Death Penalty, IV: Resources

• • criminal justice, death penalty, links, race, racism

In this last post of our four-part blog series on race and the death penalty, we* would like to provide you with some additional links.  As our series this week illustrated, the death penalty today looks very much the same as in the past. If you would like to learn more about race and the death penalty, please visit:

While the death penalty has undergone what some would call a legitimacy crisis in recent years with issues of innocence and cost becoming prominent, we argue that we should still pay attention to issues of racial bias.

~ *We are a group of four sociology students studying the death penalty in Danielle Dirks’ “Capital Punishment in America” undergraduate course at University of Texas-Austin.  This is the first post of our four-part blog series on race and the death penalty. Please read and feel free to comment or ask questions. Thank you for your time!

Race and the Death Penalty, III: Troy Anthony Davis and the Denial of Justice

• • criminal justice, death penalty, race, racism

In many ways, the story of racial injustice and the death penalty in the U.S. can be summarized in the story of Troy Anthony Davis.

On the night of August 19, 1989, an off-duty police officer, Mark MacPhail, was shot and killed. The events leading to his death are quite unclear.  Eyewitness accounts and testimonies have been altered and recanted. However, the story was reported as follows: Standing outside a Burger King in Savannah, Georgia, a black man, Sylvester “Redd” Coles was seen harassing a homeless man for beer. Coles continued to harass the homeless man and followed the man to a nearby parking lot. Several bystanders, including Troy Anthony Davis, followed the scuffle. Coles was overheard threatening to shoot the homeless man and seen hitting him over the head with a gun. Hearing the homeless man’s cries for help, MacPhail responded to the scene. While responding to the fight, a .38 caliber revolver set off ultimately killing officer MacPhail.

At first, witnesses had a hard time identifying the shooter as the scene was not well lit, and two men present, Coles and Davis, appeared similar in appearance to many.  Soon after the shooting, Coles confronted the police to tell his version of events and implicate Davis. Unaware that he was accused of a crime, Davis went to Atlanta in search of job opportunities. Davis’ trip appeared to police like an attempt to flee the scene of the crime and an admission of his guilt.

troy-davis-faces
(Protesters hold images of Davis, from here)

During the day on August 19, 1989, another shooting occurred at a party where both Coles and Davis were present. At this scene, Coles was overheard arguing with the victim. Shell casings from both scenes revealed that the same firearm had been used in both shootings. Despite the mounting evidence against Coles, his belongings were never searched, and he was never questioned as a suspect in either crime. Davis was deemed guilty and put on trial. There was never an investigation into his part in the crime, and he was never questioned as a suspect.

Here is where things get even messier…

  1. Police never corroborated Coles’ story.
  2. Without performing an investigation, Davis’ picture was broadcast on TV along with proclamations that he was a cop killer.
  3. Coles’ picture was not included in a photo lineup for witnesses.
  4. Seven out of nine witnesses have recanted their testimonies citing coercion, threats, and police pressure. Eyewitness recantations include the following: Dorothy Ferrell told police that she saw nothing, yet testified falsely.  Ferrell later told the public that she felt “compelled to identify Mr. Davis because she was on parole.  [A detective] showed Ms. Ferrell only one photograph and suggested she should [identify Davis]” [link opens PDF]. Darrell Collins was 16 at the time of his eyewitness testimony to the police.  The police threatened him with jail time if he did not identify Davis as the shooter.  Collins, afraid of being sentenced to jail time, then knowingly falsely identified Davis.
  5. One of the individuals who has not recanted his testimony is the primary alternative suspect.
  6. At the time of Davis’ habeas corpus petition, Congress cut funding to post-conviction defender organizations, such as the one representing Davis.  Therefore, Davis lost the majority of his defense and evidence of recantations and other new evidence was never discovered or heard by a jury.

The case of Troy Anthony Davis offers insight into the kind of injustices that a person of color faces in the criminal justice system. To learn more about upcoming proceedings in the Davis case, and to take action on his behalf, please visit:

With the mounting evidence of Davis’ innocence, why does he still sit on death row?  We ask several questions for readers here:

  1. If Davis were a white man, would police have produced a thorough investigation?
  2. If Davis were a white man, would his pleas of innocence be taken more seriously?
  3. If Davis were a white man, would he be provided with fair and adequate treatment by the police/justice system?

~ *We are a group of four sociology students studying the death penalty in Danielle Dirks’ “Capital Punishment in America” undergraduate course at University of Texas-Austin.  This is the first post of our four-part blog series on race and the death penalty. Please read and feel free to comment or ask questions. Thank you for your time!

Race and the Death Penalty, Part I: Who Gets the Death Penalty in America?

• • criminal justice, death penalty, racism

The history of the death penalty in America is a history about race. While African Americans comprise approximately 11 percent of the U.S. population, they have constituted half (50%) of all the people executed in the U.S. since 1800. In this post, we* begin this series by exploring racial disparities in death sentencing and executions historically and today in the U.S.

Controlling for a variety of legal and extralegal factors, studies continue to show that race of the victim is the single-most statistical factor in deciding who gets sentenced to death and who gets executed.  The most active death penalty states today are those where the most lynchings occurred historically (e.g., Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas).   See Jacobs, et al., “Vigilantism, Current Racial Threat, and Death Sentences,” American Sociological Review (2005) 70: 656-677.

There is evidence that a defendant accused of killing a white person is more likely to receive a death sentence than a defendant accused of killing a black person, especially if the defendant is black, for example:

  • Prior to Furman v. Georgia (1972), black defendants were 12 times more likely to receive a death sentence than white defendants. See Baldus, Pulaski and Woodworth, Comparative Review of Death Sentences: An Empirical Study of the Georgia Experience, 74 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 661 (1983).
  • Black defendants are nearly four (3.9) times more likely to receive a death sentence than white defendants.  See Richard C. Dieter, The Death Penalty in Black and White: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Decides, Report, Death Penalty Information Center, June, 1998.
  • Defendants accused of killing a white victim are 4.3 times more likely to receive a death sentence than defendants accused of killing a black victim.  See See Baldus, Pulaski and Woodworth, Comparative Review of Death Sentences: An Empirical Study of the Georgia Experience, 74 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 661 (1983).
  • In an examination of death penalty rates among all death-eligible defendants in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania between the years of 1983 and 1993 demonstrated that the odds of receiving the death penalty in Philadelphia increased by 38% when the accused was a black person.  D. Baldus, et al., Race Discrimination and the Death Penalty in the Post Furman Era: An Empirical and Legal Overview, with Preliminary Findings from Philadelphia, 83 Cornell L. Rev. 1638 (1998).

There is also evidence that racial disparities exist not only in who gets sentenced to death, but who is executed, for example:

  • Between 1976 and 1990, only 15 white defendants were executed for killing a black victim while 283 black defendants were executed for killing white victims.  See this U.S. Government report [opens PDF].
  • It was not until 1999 that a white person was sentenced to death for killing a black person in Texas in the case of James Byrd.
  • Defendants of color who have killed white victims have significantly higher chances of being executed than other capital defendants.  See Jacobs et al., “Who Survives on Death Row? An Individual and Contextual Analysis,” American Sociological Review (2007) 72: 610-632

The questions we invite readers to ponder are these: Is capital punishment in the United States a racially fair system?  Are you persuaded by the evidence we’ve presented here?

~ *We are a group of four sociology students studying the death penalty in Danielle Dirks’ “Capital Punishment in America” undergraduate course at University of Texas-Austin.  This is the first post of our four-part blog series on race and the death penalty. Please read and feel free to comment or ask questions. Thank you for your time!

Death Penalty: Four Part Series

• • criminal justice, death penalty, law, race, racism

I teach “Capital Punishment in America,” an undergraduate course offered through the Department of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. This semester, I have asked the students in the class to engage social media as a way to broaden our class discussion about the death penalty.   I approached Joe and Jessie about hosting part of this discussion here, and they kindly agreed to feature some of the students’ work on Racism Review.

Following this is a four-part blog series on race and the death penalty, each post written by a group of four students interested in the idea of racial disparities and the death penalty.  Part of the goal of this exercise is to generate discussion with people outside the class, so please be sure to comment.

As many Racism Review readers are aware, the death penalty has long been fraught with issues of racial bias and discrimination. While there have been attempts to improve the fairness of the system, the students’ blog posts will illustrate that we still have a long way to go when the state kills.

~ Danielle Dirks, PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, University of Texas-Austin

Criminal Alien Program Results in Racial Profiling

• • criminal justice, immigration, international, Mexican Americans

“A top priority for ICE has been to target the “worst of the worst” in the illegal population—criminal aliens incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails; those who may pose a threat to national security or public safety” ICE Annual Report FY 2008 [pdf].

Sounds reasonable, right? Of course Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should ensure national security and public safety by deporting criminals. No wonder the Homeland Security Committee allocated $180 million to this program in 2008 to ensure that incarcerated non-citizens are deported.

However, a new report from the UC Berkeley Law School finds that ICE “is not following Congress’ mandate to focus resources on the deportation of immigrants with serious criminal histories.” Instead, it is encouraging local police to engage in racial profiling and to arrest and deport people who engage in minor infractions of the law such as kicking over traffic cones or public urination.

Racial Profiling? Under the Criminal Alien Program, local police have the authority to call immigration on anyone who they suspect to be undocumented. Turns out that Hispanics are the ones police are most likely to suspect are undocumented. In a study of arrest patterns in Irving, Texas, the UC Berkeley Law School found that 96% of the people held under this program were Hispanic. Moreover, police were more likely to arrest Hispanics for minor offenses once the city began to participate in the Criminal Alien Program.

Not all Hispanics are undocumented. In fact, most Hispanics living in the United States are legal permanent residents or citizens. In Irving, Texas, however, once police began to co-operate with ICE, discretionary arrests of Hispanics for minor traffic offenses rose dramatically.

In 2006, ICE began a partnership with the city of Irving, which enabled ICE to investigate the immigration status of people held at the Irving Jail. Under this partnership, if Irving police arrest someone they suspect to be undocumented, they contact ICE to determine their immigration status. Of course, police officers can’t tell someone’s immigration status just by looking at them. In fact, in September 2007, of the 269 individuals Irving police officers referred to ICE, only 186 were turned over to ICE. The others were lawfully present in the U.S.

“Worst of the Worst”? Most of the people detained under the Criminal Alien Program in Irving, Texas were arrested for misdemeanors. In fact, only 2 percent were charged with felonies. The Berkeley report provides “compelling evidence that the Criminal Alien Program tacitly encourages local police to arrest Hispanics for petty offenses.” For example, in Irving, Texas, in April 2007, ICE agents began to offer 24-hour access to their services to the local police. Immediately thereafter, the rate at which Irving police arrested Hispanics for minor arrests began to rise. In April 2007, Irving police arrested 102 Hispanics for Class C misdemeanors. That number rose continuously until September 2007, when they arrested 246 Hispanics for Class C misdemeanors – minor offenses for which the maximum fine is $500.

It looks like the $180 million Congress appropriated to ICE is not enhancing public safety. Instead, it is encouraging local police to arrest Hispanics for petty offenses and deporting people for offenses as minor as driving with a broken tail light.

This study of one city in Texas resonates with work I have been doing with deportees in Jamaica and Guatemala. Deportees I have spoke with consistently tell me that they were stopped by police for a minor offense and subsequently placed in deportation proceedings.

A deportee I met recently in Guatemala told me this is exactly why he does not plan to apply for re-admission to the United States, even though his daughter still lives in the US. He does not want to live in a country where he will be arrested for minor traffic violations and hassled by police on a regular basis. Who does?


[Note from blog admins: ~ This is a re-blog from here.  Professor Golash-Boza will be joining Racism Review as a regular contributor, writing about her research in Jamaica, Brazil, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic where she is interviewing people who have been deported from the U.S. for a book she is writing. ]