Moral panic.

Conned: How Millions Went to Prison, Lost the Vote, and Helped Send George W. Bush to the White House

by Sasha Abramsky The New Press. 288 pages. $25.95.

Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America

by Philip Jenkins Oxford. 344 pages. $28.

Let's start with full disclosure. Sasha Abramsky has written repeatedly for this magazine in recent years. His contributions to The Progressive have included cover stories. As an editor, I have championed his work because Abramsky is a talented, savvy reporter.

Abramsky's new book, his second, treats a subject whose importance is hard to overemphasize. Americans who care about their democracy should know the information in its pages. Here's a tidbit: In Mississippi and Alabama, in 2004, "over 7 percent of all adults had had their right to vote permanently removed. In both of those states, as well as in Florida, Virginia, Washington, New Mexico, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Iowa, more than one quarter of African American men were voteless. In many other states, including Texas, one in five black men had been removed from the electoral rolls." Washington State, where the 2004 governor's race was determined by a tiny margin, is of particular interest here. And, according to Abramsky's arithmetic, if only 2 percent of disenfranchised Floridians had cast votes in the 2000 election and had "split sixty-forty in Al Gore's favor, the Democrat would have become the President come Inauguration Day 2001 ."

Conned begins with a powerful introduction. "In fighting the twinned 'War on Drugs' and 'War on Crime,' modern America has created such a vast penal network that the very cultural and institutional underpinnings of the country's democracy are now under threat," he writes. The book's title is an intelligent pun. Disenfranchisement laws, and the widespread ignorance about them, end up conning the ex-convicts. They also con any U.S. citizen who believes she lives in a democracy.

In the run-up to the 2004 election, Abramsky visited states "that either had particularly egregious disenfranchisement laws or had active political battles shaping up around this issue." He started in June and ended, after five months of travel, in Florida, shortly after the announcement that George W. Bush had once again taken the White House.

"In state after state," he writes, "I heard stories of people who had been turned away from polling booths; people who were sent letters telling them they'd been struck from the electoral rolls; people who spent hours, then days and weeks, trying, and failing, to navigate bureaucratic mazes set up to make the process of getting one's vote back as onerous as possible; and finally, and perhaps most depressingly, entire families for whom the very culture of political participation had been shattered by the pervasive impact of the juiced-up criminal justice system of late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century America."

In Abramsky's book, felony disenfranchisement means two things: denying the vote to anyone convicted of a felony and (in states that do allow former convicts to vote) failing to counter the widespread belief among prison inmates that they have forfeited their citizenship rights for life.

Like American incarceration more broadly, felony disenfranchisement disproportionately affects the poor and people of color. It is not "simply a criminal justice matter," he writes. "Its impact is too predictably absorbed by the economically marginal and the racially discriminated against to be viewed in isolation from broader social tensions." And Abramsky doesn't shy away from the implications of his study. "At its heart, Canned is a book about freedom," he writes. "Most of us take our freedom for granted; in fact, it is a most precarious condition."

I excitedly agreed to review this book after reading those first pages. But, as Conned goes on, it loses the drive that propels that first, revelatory chapter. Abramsky's writing is so detailed that it goes dull. We need to know that disenfranchisement of felons is injuring our democracy. We do not need to know, for instance, every permutation of Tennessee's disenfranchisement code, which is especially unappealing since Abramsky precedes these details by describing that code as "almost incomprehensible." After relating the many changes in the law, Abramsky dares to ask us if we are confused. The answer is yes. In fairness, Abramsky's point is that the felons are baffled, as well, but there are better ways to make that point.

Abramsky treats his book like a combination travelogue, debate with Alexis de Tocqueville, editorial, and investigative report--a potentially interesting combination. But the book repeats and drags. He tells virtually the same story again and again: Aman of woman, convicted long ago of a felony that often sounds innocuous (for instance, being a passenger in a car whose driver was dealing drugs), is, after the punishment ends, unable, of believes himself of herself to be unable, to vote. The effect is not stimulating but numbing.

Abramsky also tosses in extraneous material. He tells us extensively about the interviews he didn't get and the time he spent waiting for people to meet with him. He tells us when he gets lost of takes a pleasure drive. For no clear reason, on page 79, he writes that he took a break from his reporting to vacation in France. On page 120, he informs us that he "ate a huge plastic cup of cappuccino ice cream and mixed fruit topped off by a healthy dose of whipped cream while sitting on a bench just outside the Alamo."

With some deft but substantial cuts, Abramsky's editors could have saved him from himself. And he needs assistance. For one thing, he overwrites: "The hugest full moon I had ever seen lurked like a gigantic orange Halloween pumpkin low in the sky behind a veneer of misty cloud wisps."

More alarmingly, Abramsky seems intent on disliking many of the people and the places where he spends his time. He does some effective reporting, but appears more comfortable in the realm of opinion. And some of his opinions are outlandish. For instance, in describing the Iowans he meets, Abramsky pulls out a stereotype: "They were gentle and stolid and generally seemed utterly harmless." He then proceeds to a silly description of the disenfranchisement in that state as "an old Southern approach to crime and punishment and race relations wafting up from beneath the surface bouquet of an inclusive society."

To describe Iowa racism as "Southern" is ignorant. Midwestern racism is for the most part home grown. Calling it "Southern" suggests it is an import, rather than a real problem with deep roots in the region. Unfortunately for Abramsky, his own reporting undoes his assertion. In describing the history of Waterloo, Iowa, he points out that the ancestors of many of the black descendants of that town first arrived as strikebreakers, a nuance on a history of racism in that state that "Southern" just does not capture.

In Las Vegas, Abramsky writes of young, black people in a music superstore walking past the organizers who are attempting to register voters "silently with an expression, or rather a lack of expression, I have come to recognize over the years of my reporting as a classic blank-slate prison face." Abramsky's belief that the silent black people who walk past the organizers are former prison inmates is simply an assumption--based, like his adjectives about Iowans, on stereotype. He offers no evidence that, in good-reporter fashion, he tried to find out whether he was correct.

Abramsky the protagonist spends a great many evenings during his five months on the road drinking alone in bars accompanied only by his pocket Tocqueville. This hazardous occupation leads to false sympathy:

"After a while, it hit me: I was sitting alone, unknown, unrecognized, surrounded by all the bustle of a holiday weekend. If I was lucky, the occasional bar patron would look over at me, probably wondering what I was doing reading such a thick book in a venue catering to the carefree. More likely, I would just go through the evening unnoticed. Nobody cared if I stayed or left, if I ordered another drink, if I got bitten to death by the aggressive mosquitoes doing the rounds of the outdoor tables, of even if I drank too much to drive back to my hotel safely."

Then, Abramsky says he is like the people he is writing about--the ones who have lost the right to vote. Being beer-befuddled does not compare to being denied significant citizenship rights. Abramsky keeps getting in deeper when he then compares his fear of "being utterly insignificant, of not mattering" to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, "his description of realizing his invisibility, and the strange mixture of despair and exhilaration it unleashed."

I call attention to these flaws because the preoccupations of this book are deeply moral. And Abramsky has important things to say.

Distracting style, inane stereotyping, and repetitive anecdotes aside, this book contains real nourishment. For instance, in describing the disenfranchisement in Washington State, Abramsky writes, "We are at risk of becoming something absurd: a culture that prides itself on, even defines itself by, its democratic institutions and then systematically removes entire subgroups of people from political participation. We are becoming a country that boasts of its universal suffrage yet disenfranchises millions. In short, we are evolving into an oxymoron." Sadly, one has to eat a great deal of cardboard to find the morsels.

For those of you wondering how this country could possibly have arrived at a point where our incarceration policies tip the vote, Philip Jenkins's provocative history, Decade of Nightmares, is worth a look.

The background to the election-turning, felon disenfranchisement that Abramsky documents is the massive growth in imprisonment across the United States in the last thirty-plus years. Jenkins offers a cultural interpretation. Beginning just after 1975, an "anti-sixties" reaction set in, he argues. This reaction led to a "dramatic ... break in American history and culture." Americans inclined toward "a more pessimistic, more threatening interpretation of human behavior." But the pessimism combined also with widespread rejection of information and rational thought. "At home and abroad, the post-1975 public was less willing to see social dangers in terms of historical forces, instead preferring a strict moralistic division: Problems were a matter of evil, not dysfunction," he argues. "Ideas of relativism and complex causation were replaced by simpler and more sinister visions of the enemies facing Americans and their nation. And the forces of evil arrayed against us were conceived in terms of conspiracy and clandestine manipulation." The rise of a rhetoric of evil particularly affected discussions of war, American foreign policy, domestic poverty, terrorism, drug use, and crime, he says.

This fascination with evil showed up in movies of the period (The Exorcist, The Omen, and the many horror flicks that endowed serial killers with supernatural powers). At the same time, the country saw a tilt toward fundamentalist Christianity, which Jenkins says was part of a worldwide "shift toward conservative religious movements." What had seemed an implausible argument only a decade earlier--the existence of a real devil in people you could point to on the street--by the mid-1970s had started to seem natural to millions of Americans, he says. Not surprisingly, the rise of this irrational value led to social change.

"A florid imagery of dangerous, conspiratorial outsiders became thoroughly integrated into mainstream political rhetoric," writes Jenkins. "Moreover, these ideas were deployed most consistently to the benefit of socially conservative causes." It followed that "an absolutist moral vision reshaped politics."

The penologist Michael Tonry has in recent years argued that a series of moral panics caused the precipitous rise in the American prison population. Moral panics of all sorts are evident in Jenkins's history. The prevalent late-1970s anxieties about Satanic murder cults, subliminal evil messages in records played backward, angel dust, and serial murderers seem in hindsight like evidence of a culture eager to find the devil in its midst.

American punishment has often had a religious, specifically Christian component, so it is no wonder that the rise of public faith in evil would lead to increased attention to criminals.

"Ideas of criminality changed fundamentally from the mid-1970s, as Americans discovered a new range of villains who targeted women and children," Jenkins writes. "The worst criminals were seen as irrational monsters driven by uncontrollable violence and lust. Far from being the product of an unjust society, such criminals (usually deranged men) were nothing short of demonic. Contrary to visions of crime as a curable sickness, the focus now shifted to the offender as a predator, the perpetrator of evil. He could be incarcerated or killed but never cured."

Although Jenkins associates the language of illness and cure with the 1960s, the metaphor of criminality as a sickness goes back much further than that. Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, was fond of the metaphor, which in his letters of the 1780s and 1790s seems as revolutionary as democracy itself.

The turn against the 1960s included a rejection of the long tradition of American social concern for rehabilitation. Many criminologists in the 1970s were after the devil. "Wicked people exist," wrote James Q. Wilson in 1975. "Nothing avails except to set them apart from innocent people."

This is not history for those who don't want to make an effort. While not overly weighted with theory, Decade of Nightmares is still an academic book. But Jenkins's bold idea that the 1970s (not the much-emphasized 1960s and 1980s) was a pivotal decade is interesting.

Abramsky suggests that disenfranchisement is dangerous. Jenkins demonstrates that the crime policies that have led to disenfranchisement are the result of deeply irrational behavior.

"The idea of evil flourishes in American public discourse," writes Jenkins. Like Abramsky, he warns that this stark way of understanding people and life is having an unfortunate effect on American democracy.

Anne-Marie Cusac is the investigative reporter for The Progressive.