STUDIES: LAWS COVERING FELONS CUT BLACK VOTER REGISTRATION

As many as one of every seven black men in Atlanta who have been convicted
of a felony, and one of every four in Providence, R.I., cannot vote in this
year's election, according to a pair of studies released Wednesday.

The studies, the first to look at felon disenfranchisement laws' effect on
voting in individual cities, add to a growing body of evidence that those
laws have a disproportionate effect on African-Americans because the
percentage of black men sentenced to prison is much larger than their share
of the general population.

The study in Atlanta concluded that two-thirds of the gap in voter
registration between black men and other ethnic and gender groups was
attributable to Georgia's felon disenfranchisement law.

``We have the conventional wisdom that African-American males register to
vote at lower rates because of political apathy,'' said the study's author,
Ryan King of the Sentencing Project, a research and prisoners' rights group
based in Washington. But the new data clearly indicates that ``their
registration is artificially suppressed by the disproportionate effect of
their disenfranchisement.''

The Atlanta study also found that about one-third of black men who had lost
the right to vote because of a felony had been convicted of drug crimes.

``This is important,'' King said, ``because drug arrests are inherently
discretionary.'' Other research has shown that blacks do not use drugs more
than whites but are arrested on drug charges, and convicted, at a much
higher rate.

Interest in the effect of felon disenfranchisement laws has increased since
the presidential election of 2000, when George W. Bush won Florida by only
537 votes; an estimated 600,000 people in the state, most of them black,
were barred from voting because of felony convictions.

Florida is one of nine states that permanently forbid a felon to vote, even
after the prison term or time on probation or parole has been fulfilled.
Neither Georgia nor Rhode Island goes that far; in both states, as in
California, a felon can recover the right to vote after serving his time in
prison or on probation or parole.