***** "Those People in That Prison Can't Vote Me Out": The Political Consequences of Racist Felony Disenfranchisement
By Paul Street
. . . 4.4 million Americans are disenfranchised due to a past or current felony conviction. No other nation imprisons a larger share of its population or marks so large a share of its population with the lifelong mark of a serious (felony) criminal record. According to the best estimates last year, 13 million Americans – fully 7 percent of the adult population and an astonishing 12 percent of the adult male population – possess felony records.
At the same time, no other democratic nation denies the vote to a remotely comparable share of its offender and ex-offender population. According to Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, the leading academic authorities on felon and ex-felon voting rights, "48 states disenfranchise incarcerated felons, 37 states disenfranchise felony probationers or parolees (or both), and 14 states additionally disenfranchise some or all ex-felons who have completed their sentences." America’s army of disenfranchised felons and ex-felons "are expected," note Manza and Uggen, "to respect the law (and indeed, are often subject to significantly harsher penalties and face a higher level of scrutiny, than non-felons). They are expected to pay taxes to the government, and to be governed by elected officials. Yet they have no formal right to participate in the selection of those officials or the public policies that allocate government expenditures." Among those expenditures we might include the hundreds of billions of dollars that American governments spend on mass surveillance, arrest, detention, prosecution, incarceration, and post-release criminal supervision. . . .
The central factor is that imprisonment and related felony-marking in the US have "changed," in Northwestern University sociologist Devah Pager's words, "from a punishment reserved for only the most heinous offenders to one extended to a much greater range of crimes and much larger segment of the population." People who committed nonviolent, especially drug crimes accounted for more than three fourths of the nation's increase in prisoners between 1978 and 1996.
These trends have impacted black communities with special harshness. While blacks make up just 15 percent of illicit drug users, they account for 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses. They comprise 42 percent of those held in federal prison for drug charges and 62 percent of those in state prisons. Blacks constituted more than 75 percent of the total drug prisoners in America in one third of all states according to a report issued in 2000 by the prestigious human rights organization Human Rights Watch. Black crime rates have been consistently higher than the white crime rate, consistent with blacks' lower socioeconomic status and related higher stress levels and weaker social and familial structures, but there has been no massive upsurge of black criminality that could even remotely explain the skyrocketing black incarceration and felony rates. . . .
To get a sense of how this plays out in terms of racial political power, consider some numbers from my own home state. The Chicago metropolitan area is home to 83 percent of the state's African-Americans and point of origin for 70 percent of the state's prisoners. Nearly two thirds (64 percent) of the state's 45, 629 prisoners in 2001 were African-American, a percentage more than four timers greater than blacks' share of Illinois' population. Forty-four percent of the state's prisoners are African Americans from Chicago’s Cook County. Eighteen of the twenty adult correctional facilities constructed over the last two decades in Illinois are located in counties that are disproportionately white for the state. Just four of the state's twenty post-1980 prison towns have above-average black populations for the state but in three of those this is only because they get to report prisoners as part of their population. Five of the six adult Illinois correctional centers constructed in the 1990s are located in the southern third of the state. Visitors to such very visibly white downstate towns as Ina, Illinois (home of the Big Muddy Correctional Center), would be surprised to learn from the Census Bureau that that community is 42 percent African-American and 90 percent male. The explanation, of course, is mass incarceration.
It’s not enough, apparently that each black prisoner is worth tens of thousands of economic development dollars. According to distinguished criminologist Todd Clear, writing in 1996, the prison boom fed by the rising “market” of Black offenders is in fact a remarkable economic multiplier for communities that are often far removed from urban minority concentrations. “Each prisoner,” he found “represents as much as $25,000 in income [annually] for the community in which the prison is located, not to mention the value of constructing the prison facility in the first place. This,” Clear says, amounts to “a massive transfer of value [emphasis added].”
Part of this “massive transfer,” it should be added, includes state and federal funding allotments granted on the basis of census counts, weighted to increase with the size of a jurisdiction’s poverty population (and most prisoners are poor). An investigation by The Chicago Reporter, an excellent local public affairs magazine, finds that racially disparate mass incarceration’s interaction with the geography of prison construction, political districting rules and federal budgetary practices to cost Chicago’s Cook County nearly $88 million in federal benefits between 2000 and 2010 (see Molly Dugan, “Census Dollars Bring bounty to Prison Towns”). None of that money redounds to the benefit of those who are responsible for it, of course – the prisoners who do not get to drive on the improved roads or enjoy the improved services built and provided with federal and state grants that rise with mass imprisonment’s inflationary impact on local and regional census counts.
All of which provides some interesting context for a Chicago Tribune story that bears the perverse title “Towns Put Dreams in Prisons.” (Chicago Tribune, March 20, 2001, 2C:1). In “downstate” Hoopeston, Illinois, the Tribune reported, there was “talk of the mothballed canneries that once made this a boom town and whether any of that bustling spirit might return if the Illinois Department of Corrections comes to town.”
“You don’t like to think about incarceration,” Hoopeston’s Mayor told the Tribune, “but this is an opportunity for Hoopeston. We’ve been plagued by plant closings.” The Hoopeston Mayor’s willingness to enter the prison sweepstakes was validated by another small town mayor, Andy Hutchens of Ina, Illinois. According to the Tribune, in a passage that reminds us to include diversion of tax revenue among the ways that mass incarceration steals wealth from the inner city:
Before [Ina’s] prison was built, the city took in just $17,000 a year in motor fuel tax revenue. Now the figure is more like $72,000. Last year’s municipal budget appropriation was $380,000. More than half of that money is prison revenue. Streets that were paved in chipped gravel and oil for generations soon will all be covered in asphalt. And $850,000 community center that doubles as a gym and computer lab for the school across the street is being paid for with prison money, Hutchens said. Because state and federal tax revenue is figured per capita, a prison population that puts no strains on village services is a permanent windfall for a little town such as Ina, Hutchens said. “It really figures out this way. This little town of 450 people is getting the tax money of a town of 2,700,” Hutchens told the Tribune, and then added with a grin, “_And those people in that prison can’t vote me out of office_.” [emphasis added].
The same sort of developmental perversity is certainly underway in other states, including New York, where 66% of a disproportionately black state inmate population comes from New York City but 91 percent of prisoners are housed in “upstate” prisons. Every single New York state prison built since 1982 has been constructed in an “upstate” community and 34 New York State Assembly districts are based in part on prisoners (see Peter Wagner’s useful The Prison Index, Prison Policy Initiative, 2003, pp. 38-39). According to a recent Prison Policy Initiative study titled “Importing Constituents: Prison and Political Clout in New York,” prisoners make up 7 percent of a recently formed New York Assembly district belonging to New York Redistricting Taskforce member Chris Ortloff. Of the nearly 6,000 black adults in Ortloff’s district, 82.6 percent are barred by law from ever voting for or against him because they are prisoners. . . .
Paul Street (pstreet at cul-chicago.org) is an urban social policy researcher in Chicago, Illinois. He writes on class, race, imperialism and thought control. He is the author of The Vicious Circle: Race, Prisons, and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation (available online at www.cul-chicago.org)
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