At the CNN Town Halls on Monday night (4/22), there was a question directed at Bernie Sanders: "Would support enfranchising the Boston Bomber, a convicted terrorist and murderer... to vote?" This evoked the memory of Bernard Shaw asking Michael Dukakis’ in 1988 ''if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?” as a gotcha question specifically designed to torpedo someone’s candidacy. The Boston Bomber argument is just as much of a red herring as the Kitty Dukakis question was.
Framing felony voter disenfranchisement in this way is specifically designed to paint all felons as just as bad as the Boston Bomber. We have a real problem with felony disenfranchisement, mass incarceration, and institutional racism in this country, and they are all invariably tied together. Trying to derail reform in this manner is nothing short of despicable, and CNN should be ashamed that they selected that audience question to be asked.
It is a little know fact that the United States of American, which calls itself the ‘Home of the Free’, is actually the world’s worst jailer of it’s own people in the entire world. We are worse than China, worse than Russia, worse than Iran or South Africa or North Korea or any of the countries our leaders love to demonize as being against freedom on a daily basis.
The US incarcerates about 760 people per 100,000 (about one in every 130 Americans). The next worst place is Russia with about 624, and the next worst are in the low 300 range. The average in the Nordic Nations like Norway and Finland is only about one tenth as bad as it is in the US.
This is just the number of people currently behind bars. The US has over 2 million people currently locked up, which even surpassed China’s 1.6 million, even though they have 5 times the number of people we do. The USA only has about 4% of the world’s total population, but house 25% of the prisoners in the world.
Nearly half of all American have a close family member who has been incarcerated. 1 in 33 people are currently either behind bars or on parole/probation. So clearly Mass incarceration is a serious epidemic in America to begin with, and a direct result of conservative ‘tough on crime’ laws that started to be implemented in the 1980’s under Reagan, and exacerbated by the Crime Bill partially written by Joe Biden and signed by Bill Clinton.
This brings us to the fact that not only is mass incarceration terrible in America, but how it is only racists as well. Institutional Racism is nowhere better exemplified than in the incarceration complex.
Whereas 1 in 106 white males over the age of 18 are incarcerated, 1 in 35 Hispanics are, and 1 in 15 blacks are. Native Americans suffer the worst incarceration rates of any ethnic minority population.
When there are 3 times as many Latino’s locked up per capita than whites, and 8 times as many blacks, there is zero doubt the incarceration complex is openly racist. When felons are denied the right to vote as US Citizens, it impacts minorities far, far worse than it impacts whites.
This brings us to Felony Disenfranchisement. The USA is one of the most repressive countries in the world when it comes to denying a ‘felony class’ crime (which can be as simple as possessing a marijuana joint in some states) a vote. 2 states currently allow people convicted of a felon to vote while behind bars at this time, 14 more after they are released, and 23 more after they have finished parole or probation. Nowhere in the US Constitution does it imply that felons should be denied their right to vote.
Some states are far worse than others with denial of voting rights. Florida for instance has 1.6 million people that have been permanently denied their right to vote. That’s 10.4% of eligible voters. Other conservative Southern states have terrible percentages too. Mississippi has a rate of 9.6%, Kentucky 9.1%, Tennessee 8.3%, Virginia 7.8%, and Alabama 7.6% of voters are disenfranchised, the majority being black and hispanic.
So clearly we have a problem with racist disenfranchisement of voting rights inherent to our mass incarceration system too. By only focusing on the worst violent criminals to frame this debate, it is clear distraction, or red-herring away from the crux of the problem. This isn’t about the Boston Bomber specifically, this is about the voting rights being systematically stripped away from predominantly minority populations by the incarceration complex. Thankfully Bernie Sanders, and to a degree Kamala Harris (though there was some equivocation in her statement), have the courage to take the politically risky courage to stand up to this racist mass incarceration and felon disenfranchisement in this age where so many minorities are being denied voting rights as US Citizens.
