The costs of felony disenfranchisement: an interview with Conned author Sasha Abramsky.

The Humanist: How did you come up with the idea for the book?

Abramsky: I'd been doing a lot of criminal justice related journalism for about a decade and one of the things that interested me was that, as more and more people went into prison, there were collateral implications that weren't being discussed. And those were everything from changes in the way the economy was structured to changes in political access. So the book actually came about following a series of articles I wrote post 2000 about this issue, especially the way it played out in Florida. I thought, there's actually a bigger story here, one that cant be told just through articles. There's a story that involves how America relates to its politics. So I went on the road and did Conned.

The Humanist: What surprised you most about what you found?

Abramsky: I think what surprised me most is that this isn't an abstract story, this isn't just about philosophy, it isn't just about theoretical rights. What also surprised me was the raw number of people who really cared passionately. All the time I was told by politicians, oh, these guys wouldn't vote even if they could. I think for me, the biggest eye opener was seeing that a lot of them wanted to vote. I recognized that you cant judge this entire category of people by label.

The Humanist: You used Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America as a guide, can you talk about that--why you picked that work and how it shaped your book?

Abramsky: Democracy in America isn't a bible or anything, but it's a very important insight into what America was at a very early moment in its history. And I like the way that de Tocqueville set about his project. I like two things about de Tocqueville: one, he actually started his project thinking he was writing about prisons, which is sort of where I got into the topic; and he realized that America's embrace of prisons actually said a lot about American society because, back then, prisons were paradoxically quite progressive institutions. De Tocqueville's technique sort of morphed from being an observer of prisons to an observer of democracy. I felt that my journalism was morphing from being just about the criminal justice system to being about an implosion of the democratic system. So I took de Tocqueville around with me almost as a reminder of a more optimistic version of what American political institutions should be about, and then obviously used his story. He pops up periodically in my book. I use his story, I guess, to hold a mirror to current realities.

The Humanist: Do you think being born in England gave you a unique perspective on writing about the United States?

Abramsky: I don't think it gave me a unique perspective, but if you're part of a country and have always been a part of the country it's harder to distance yourself a little bit. I came to the United States from England when I was twenty-one. For me it's interesting to see a country with a somewhat critical perspective. I love living here, so I'm not saying I dislike the country. I think it's a fantastic political system, but I also think that sometimes it's too easy on itself. I think the way in which it uncritically accepts the notion that it's an absolute democracy, doesn't have any sort of limiting mechanism to its democracy, is very simplistic. And something like disenfranchisement of felons might be easier to analyze from an outside perspective, because I'm more prepared to be a bit critical.

The Humanist: Given that, among people who are registered to vote, there's still relatively low turnout in the United States compared to other democracies, do you think part of that is because of the disenfranchisement of felons?

Abramsky: It's one component. If you look at what's happening, there's a cultural disaffectation with the political process. Across the board, especially in low income communities, there's this feeling that the politics isn't responsive. So people vote when they think it matters, and they don't vote if they feel it's a game. So I think one component part of this problem is that, as more and more people get disenfranchised, that ricochets outwards into the community. If you're in a poor community, and one in three men in that community can't vote, it's going to have a magnifier effect. If I can't vote because I have a felony conviction, it's more than likely that my girlfriend isn't going to vote because I don't vote. And if my girlfriend doesn't vote, it's quite likely her kids won't vote. You create a cycle of disengagement. So I don't think it's the only reason we have low turnout, but I do think it exacerbates an existing problem.

The Humanist: Do you think being in prison has changed people's views about society and their involvement in it?

Abramsky: Anecdotally. I talked to a lot of people for whom prison was a very formative experience. Prison obviously isn't a good thing and very few people come out of prison and say, yeah, I'm glad I went there. Occasionally you hear it. But most people who go in hate it, though it does change their approach to life. It doesn't leave people neutral. One thing they say is that they weren't political going into prison but, surviving as law abiding people when they get out, oftentimes they do want to get engaged politically. And you do encounter quite a lot for whom the franchise only be came an issue when they lost it.

The Humanist: Can you talk a little bit about how the war on drugs in the United States has impacted felony disenfranchisement?

Abramsky: The war on drugs doesn't create the problem; the war on drugs exacerbates the problem. These laws were on the books well before the war on drugs kicked off What the war on drugs does is take a lot of people who in previous decades or centuries wouldn't have been considered felons. It felonizes their actions, and in doing so it channels a lot more people into the criminal justice system, which is very expensive and doesn't actually solve addiction problems. So it's an economic burden. The second thing it does is remove the vote from people who often times have done relatively low end crimes. And I think in that sense it makes disenfranchisement even more philosophically problematic. Let's say disenfranchisement was limited to violent felons: murderers, rapists, armed robbers. The numbers would be much smaller and there are still going be some ethical issues. But there are going to be fewer major ethical issues about at least temporarily taking away their right to vote. And there probably aren't going to be that many people up in arms about permanently removing their right to vote. But once you expand disenfranchisement to more nonviolent offenders, it's much more ethically problematic. It's harder to justify why being arrested with marijuana or illegal valium, let's say, should have any connection whatsoever with political participation.

The Humanist: Do you think there's any validity to the argument about why some felons shouldn't have the right to vote, and can you talk a bit about why you focused oil exfelon disenfranchisement?

Abramsky: I'm not sure there's validity, but I think it's a respectable argument worthy of debate to say that if somebody is currently incarcerated or serving time for an offense they should have their vote restricted. That doesn't mean I agree with it, but I can understand the philosophical argument. It's basically that, if someone's broken a socially agreed upon law, for the duration of their punishment, they shouldn't have a say in making the law or electing the people who make the law. You can counter that in some ways but it certainly can't be dismissed out of hand, and some countries do disenfranchise current prisoners. It's much harder philosophically to defend permanent disenfranchisement. Very few people defend it head on. They'll sort of employ procedural motions to make sure that it doesn't come to a floor vote. But the ones who do aggressively defend it, often hark back to a nineteenth century grab bag. They talk about the purity of the franchise, the fact that once you allow a criminal underclass to vote you've polluted the franchise. There's a rhetoric of pollution. It's a rhetoric that made some sense in nineteenth century discourse, because the nineteenth century hadn't yet come to the consensus that universal suffrage was a necessary part of democracy. In twenty-first century America there is a consensus on universal suffrage, that adult suffrage is the goal in any democracy. So it's very hard philosophically to defend permanent disenfranchisement in a modern context; it isn't done very well. Usually it just comes down to a shouting match: I don't want to be soft on crime; you're soft on crime if you propose it.

The Humanist: In your book, you also talk about personal stories of people who found out that they can vote, but it takes them a long time to go through a bureaucratic process to regain the right. Do you think that in some ways this is a bigger problem than specific disenfranchisement laws?

Abramsky: It's not a bigger problem, but it's a secondary problem, and it's an important secondary problem. There are two secondary problems, one is that, even in states where people can vote when they come out of prison, there's a very powerful street rumor mill that says they cant. They don't believe they can vote and they don't apply to vote. That's one problem. The other one is what you just talked about, how there's so much paperwork. There's an extreme uncertainty about how the law operates, and the uncertainty affects people not just applying to get their vote back but also correction officers and election officials. There's a lot of data out there from Washington State and New York and few other places that election officials don't know these laws.

The Humanist: Could that be intentional, or an intentionally racist policy?

Abramsky: It might be in individual instances, but I think more systemically the problem is that there's no standardized way of getting your vote back. Each state has its own regulations. Tennessee has like five different sets of regulations depending on when you were convicted. And it's an extremely arcane area of election law. A lot of election officials just eye the volunteers; they're not constitutional experts. So yeah, in certain instances it could be racist intent, but more generally it's just systemic ignorance.

The Humanist: Why do you think the situation is worse in the South? Is it because of the racial history?

Abramsky: It's about the racial history and it's about the more generally conservative history. For the racial history from the Civil War onwards, the criminal justice system was used very explicitly as a prop of Jim Crow. So it was used to remove the vote from blacks and it was also used to sweep emancipated slaves up, put them in prison on relatively minor charges, and then lease them out for labor purposes in the South. So there's a history of using the criminal justice system for other purposes there. More generally, the South is the area which was most resistant to the idea of universal suffrage as an end goal of democracy. If it accepted it, it only accepted it in the 1970s, post Voting Rights Act. Even in the 80s and 90s there were still politically active figures who cut their teeth on explicitly racist platforms--in both parties, Democrats and Republicans.

The Humanist: Do you think religion plays into that?

Abramsky: Actually, in the book I'm working on at the moment, I argue that it does. I wouldn't claim to be able to prove it; I'm not a religious scholar. But I do think that there's a strand of Bible belt Christianity that's very non-forgiving. Not everybody in the South will adhere to it, but there's a strand that believes that God is the one who does the forgiving and man imposes the laws. And it doesn't really allow for on-Earth redemption. And if you aren't going to have on-Earth redemption, then why would you care about extending the vote? Because you only extend the vote if you think there's a chance someone will be rehabilitated.

The Humanist: If these people are so adamantly Christian, and redemption and forgiveness are a big part of Christianity, shouldn't this encourage people to reinstate the right to vote? Are there some people who argue for it that way?

Abramsky: There is a strand that does--the Quaker movement is very progressive on criminal justice. I think the American criminal justice system, more than other Western systems, is based on religious ideas. But there's a wall within the criminal justice system about what kind of religion. There are two poles: the Quakers, who basically set up the modern prison system and were interested in reform and redemption--that's at one end. At the other end are fundamentalists to a large degree--they'll believe in born again experiences and they'll believe in charismatic change and everything else, but they won't systemically believe that prisons are the places where they're going to churn out rehabilitated people who are worthy of the vote. It's going to be very much that individual redemption. So yeah, religion is important.

The Humanist: How do you think voting patterns would change in terms of who got elected if ex-felons were given the right to vote and knew about it?

Abramsky: It isn't really a question of who would get elected if ex-felons could vote. It's who would get elected if suddenly several million people from low income communities had their right to vote. Because, overwhelmingly, the people who lose their right to vote are permanently at the low income range. Many of them are African American. When you talk to them, they aren't thinking, "I want to vote because I want to vote for somebody who's going to be good to ex-felons." That isn't how they categorize themselves. The ones who are interested in voting want to vote because they care about economic issues, they care about social issues, the kind of issues most people care about.

Now what do I think would happen if you expanded the franchise to that group? Well, it depends on the election. It's very hard to crunch the numbers out of Florida and come to any other conclusion than, in 2000, that made the difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush or was one of any number of things that, by themselves, would have made the difference. More generally, because 2000 was somewhat of an anomaly, I think what you see is, in some Southern states now, 5 to 7 percent of the electorate has disappeared, and often times those are states that have pretty close races for governor, senator, house of representatives--important political offices. If you assume that 5 to 7 percent of the electorate is missing, it strikes me that for those competitive elections, you at least have to question if they truly reflect the majority of adult citizens. My guess is, in expanding disenfranchisement, we've made it a little bit easier for conservatives to get elected. We've made it a little bit harder, maybe in some instances quite a bit harder, for non-conservatives to get elected. And that creates a self-sustaining mechanism. If you skew state house rivalries, then you give conservative politicians control over congressional districts, which makes it easier to skew Congress. So you gradually sort of envision a scenario in which restrictive enfranchisement is self-sustaining.

The Humanist: At the grassroots level, for people who read this book and want to do something, what is the easiest or most feasible thing for them to do to bring about change?

Abramsky: It would depend on the state. In Alabama and Florida, the laws are up for debate and there are plenty of people trying to change them, so writing a letter to legislators isn't a bad idea. There are also voting rights groups out there on the ground trying to educate people. In a state like New York, where in theory people can vote but the election officials are asking for more information, there are two issues: to actually educate people about their voting rights and to educate election officials about technical aspects of the elections. That isn't a grassroots thing; it's just something that people need to recognize.

The Humanist: Has your view of America changed at all, have you become more optimistic or pessimistic?

Abramsky: In a perverse way I've become more optimistic because on the road there were a tremendous number of people I met who cared about things like this. And this book isn't, by any stretch of the imagination, intended to bash America. In a sense the reason I wrote it is because I think there's something to live up to. We do have ideals, and pretty good ideals. But we aren't really living up to them very well in a lot of places.

Meredith Meacham received her B.A. from the University of Chicago and is the editorial assistant for the Humanist.