Should felons be allowed to vote?

The criminal justice system targets minorities

Question: Should felons be allowed to vote?
Position‹3 of 5›: Felons should be able to vote even while in prison
Argument‹3 of 3: The criminal justice system targets minorities

Felons are disproportionately comprised of minorities, particularly African-American men. Felony disenfranchisement is thus a legal means of suppressing their votes.

The argument

The argument begins from the observation that felony disenfranchisement does not fall evenly across the population, and that its unevenness tracks race closely enough for the criminal justice system's racial disparities to be read as an indication of racism. According to the Sentencing Project, one-third of African-American men in the U.S. have a felony, and African-Americans comprise almost 40% of prison inmates despite making up only 12% of the population. Whatever explains that gap, the gap is the starting point: a rule that attaches a penalty to a felony conviction will impose that penalty on a group convicted at several times its share of the population. The vote is the penalty in question, and its distribution follows directly. "1 of every 13 African-Americans has lost their voting rights due to felony disenfranchisement laws, vs. 1 in every 56 non-black voters." The disparity in incarceration is therefore reproduced as a disparity in political power. Proponents of this view argue that this is what makes disenfranchisement serve to prevent African-Americans specifically from voting, whatever its stated rationale: it is ultimately a way for the government to legally discriminate against the African-American population, which is why the practice has even been called the "New Jim Crow." The comparison is to a system that achieved racial exclusion from the ballot through facially neutral rules rather than explicit ones. The pattern is not confined to one group. Incarceration statistics indicate that this disparity also applies to other minority populations; for example, "Hispanic men are 2.3 times are likely as white men to be incarcerated." A disenfranchisement rule layered on top of that pattern produces the same result for them. On this reading, the United States' incarceration system has served to subjugate minorities by finding a legal means of taking away their voting rights, and the remedy is to sever the link by allowing felons to vote even while in prison.

Premises

[P1]The criminal justice system incarcerates minorities at vastly disproportionate rates — African Americans make up about 40% of inmates despite being 12% of the population. [P2] As a result, felony disenfranchisement strips 1 in 13 African Americans of the vote, versus 1 in 56 other voters — a pattern called the 'New Jim Crow'. [P3] Allowing this to remove voting rights lets the government legally discriminate against minorities. [C] Therefore, because felony disenfranchisement targets minorities, felons should be able to vote even while in prison.

Counter-arguments

Disenfranchising felons is not a racially discriminatory practice. The criminal justice system disenfranchises all felons, not only minorities. The overrepresentation of minorities in felon disenfranchisement is merely an unfortunate coincidence.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Not letting felons vote is nothing to do with race; it is about looking out for the good of society.

Proponents cited

Andrew Yang
“6.1 million Americans cannot vote due to a felony conviction and are therefore denied the right to cast their vote in an election. Felony disenfranchisement exacerbates racial disparities. 1 in 13 black Americans have lost their right to vote vs. 1 in 56 white Americans.”
Michelle Alexander
“[Young black males are] shuttled into prisons, branded as criminals and felons, and then when they're released, they're relegated to a permanent second-class status, stripped of the very rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement — like the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, the right to be free of legal discrimination and employment, and access to education and public benefits. Many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again, once you've been branded a felon.”
Emily Tredeau
“I do think that it’s not a coincidence that it’s only Maine and Vermont that allow inmate voting . . . White voters will give pause before they disenfranchise other white people.”