THE END OF TOUGH-ON-CRIME POLITICS

Millions of Felons in the US Have Been Stripped of Their Voting
Rights. It's Time to Give Them Back

For over 30 years, one of the leitmotifs of US politics has involved
the sorry spectacle of politicians from both sides of the spectrum
pushing ever-tougher measures simply so they could score cheap points
during election seasons.

But tough-on-crime was always a smoke-and-mirrors game. Introducing
mandatory minimum sentences, removing perks such as education from
prisons and scaling back parole systems might have made the lives of
individual criminals more unpleasant, and certainly sent a message to
irate taxpayers and voters that their money wasn't being spent on
coddling thugs, but these policies never really served to tackle the
causes of crime or to help convert prisoners into law-abiding citizens
(witness the extremely high number of parolees who cycle back into
prison within a couple years of release).

One of the tragedies of this trend was a wholesale disenfranchisement
process. The reason, as I've explained in earlier Guardian articles,
is that many states still adhere to 19th-century laws that remove
felons from the political process and make it extraordinarily
difficult for them to ever regain their right to vote. Until the
twinned wars on crime and drugs quadrupled America's incarceration
rate (pdf) in the last three decades of the 20th-century, more than
doubling since the mid-1980s alone, the number of people impacted by
such laws was relatively small. Once low-end drug offenders, in
particular, began being processed wholesale through the criminal
justice system, that equation shifted. Instead of the disenfranchised
being a small population made up mainly of relatively high-end
offenders, it ballooned into a huge population predominantly made up
of low-end offenders.

In that inversion metastasised a massive challenge to America's
democratic ideals. By 2004, Florida was disenfranchising close to a
million citizens of voting age. Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia,
Tennessee, Kentucky and several others states (mainly, though not
exclusively in the South) also had removed the vote from hundreds of
thousands of men and women. All told, by 2004, over five million US
citizens had lost their right to vote.

African-Americans, caught up in war on drug sweeps in massive numbers,
were hugely overrepresented in the pool of America's voteless, being
denied the right to vote at a rate seven times that of the overall
population. In the permanent disenfranchisement states, anywhere from
one in five to one in three black males had lost their right to vote.
States that a generation earlier had been forced to open up their
franchises by the combined moral force of the Civil Rights movement
and political force of reformers in DC now saw the number of eligible
African-American voters shrivel again.

In a country in the throes of tough-on-crime politics, reformers had
precious little room to push this issue. Re-enfranchise a one-time
drug prisoner, a burglar, a con artist? You must be insane. Even
though mass criminal justice involvement for an increasing array of
low-end crimes meant that this was clearly a civil rights issue - the
burden of which fell on poor and minority citizens - and one with
enormous political implications, it was framed exclusively as a
criminal justice theme.

Now, however, tough-on-crime politics seems largely to have run its
course. For the first time in a generation, neither major candidate is
making a big hue and cry about his tough-on-crime credentials. That's
not because Barack Obama and John McCain are weak on crime, but
because they both seem to have recognised there are better ways to
tackle crime than simply play-acting at being Hanging Judge-type
characters for the news headlines.

While the prison population continues to grow, it is doing so largely
because of the ongoing implementation of bad laws passed in the 1980s
and 1990s rather than because of a rash of new punitive legislation.
The political capital to be gained from talking tough on low-end
criminals simply isn't there anymore in a country fearful of economic
collapse and nervous about America's role on the global stage.

And in this transformation is an opportunity. Over the past four
years, reformers have successfully pushed Florida to re-enfranchise
over 100,000 of its citizens. Iowa's governor signed an executive
order restoring the right to vote to all felons who had completed
their sentences in his state. Virginia's governor recently pledged to
speed up the processing of re-enfranchisement applications from
non-violent felons. New Mexico, Delaware, Washington and several other
states modified their laws. And two states Connecticut and Rhode
Island passed laws allowing their parolees and people on probation
to cast ballots in elections.

At a federal level, senators Hillary Clinton and Russ Feingold, along
with several prominent members of the House of Representatives, have
pushed legislation that would establish a right to vote in federal
elections for all felons upon completion of their sentence. Perhaps
most importantly, traditionally liberal groups such as the ACLU and
the NAACP are no longer the only ones calling for change. The American
Bar Association now supports re-enfranchisement, as does the national
organisation representing the country's parole officers. Many district
attorneys have also come out in support, arguing that social policy
should be designed to encourage ex-offenders to think that they have
stakes in society rather than to believe they are permanently excluded
from it.

These reforms have been won because the language surrounding the issue
has changed. People are once again talking more about voting rights
and civil rights and the importance of civic participation and less
about crime and punishment and unremitting toughness. How long this
window for change will remain open is unclear. Were crime to rise
again, were a new drug epidemic to start dominating the media's
attention, that window could all-too-rapidly be slammed shut. But,
while it remains ajar there's a real opportunity to pass more state
and federal reforms that, taken together, would serve to bring
millions of Americans back into the country's political process.

The opportunity should be seized, not out of any warm-and-fuzzy,
wishy-washy impulse, but out of societal self-interest. Re-integrating
ex-offenders into society, into its political and its economic
structures, is one of the smartest anti-crime strategies going.