Restoring Voting Rights to Convicted Felons: Books and Documents on the Topic of Restoring Voting Rights to Felons

Living in Infamy: Felon Disfranchisement and the History of American Citizenship examines the history of disfranchisement for criminal conviction in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the post-war South, white southern Democrats expanded the usage of lawsdisfranchising for crimes of infamy in order to deny African Americans the suffrage rights due them as citizens, employing historical similarities between the legal statuses of slaves and convicts as justification. At the same time, our nation's criminal code changed. The inhumane treatment ofprisoners, the expansion of the prison system, the public nature of punishment by forced labor, and the abandonment of the idea of reform and rehabilitation of prisoners all contributed to a national consensus that certain categories of criminals should be permanently disfranchised.As racial barriers to suffrage were challenged and fell, rights remained restricted for persons targeted by such infamy laws. Criminal convictions - in place of race - continued the disparity in legal status between whites and African Americans. Decades later, after race-based disfranchisement hasofficially ended, legislation steeped in a legacy of racial discrimination continues to perpetuate a dichotomy of suffrage and citizenship that is still effecting our election outcomes today.

Utilizing a field study on felons that were within one year of completing incarceration, Pinkard analyzes the legal history, constitutionality, conflicting laws, political, and life chance consequences of felon disenfranchisement laws on African American felons and the African American community. Research and data presented in this book indicate that: felon disenfranchisement is based on moralistic beliefs, modern racism, and stereotypes about human differences and that permanent political marginalization of a particular segment of American society not only negates democracy in principle by diluting voter participation and equal representation but also assures the debasement of specific segments of society and the life chances of African Americans in particular.

In the 2004 presidential election, 4,686,539 AmericansOCoa population greater than the city of Los AngelesOCowere barred from the polls. In a country that has extended suffrage to virtually every other class of citizen, ex-felons are the sole segment of our population deemed unworthy to exercise what the Supreme Court has called the right preservative of all other rights, the right to vote. "The Disenfranchisement of Ex-Felons "provides a comprehensive overview of the history, nature, and far-reaching sociological and political consequences of denying ex-felons the right to vote. Readers learn state practices in Florida and Ohio during the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections; arguments that have been used in court houses, legislatures, and the press to justify such practices; and attempts to reverse legislation through state and federal governments. In a timely appendix to the 2004 election, Elizabeth Hull makes her case that the battle for civil rights will not be won unless ex-felons, who have fulfilled their obligations to society, are restored the same rights afforded all other American citizens."

'Conned' takes us on a journey through America, detailing the revival of anti-democratic laws that came of age in the post-Civil War segregationist South. From the Pacific Northwest to Miami, with stops in a dozen states in between, this book shows how this problem has played a decisive role in elections nationwide.

This collection of original essays by leading scholars and advocates offers the first international examination of the nature, causes, and effects of laws regulating voting by people with criminal convictions. In deciding whether prisoners shall retain the right to vote, a country faces vital questions about democratic self-definition and constitutional values - and, increasingly, about the scope of judicial power. Yet in the rich and growing literature on comparative constitutionalism, relatively little attention has been paid to voting rights and election law. This book begins to fill that gap, by showing how constitutional courts in Israel, Canada, South Africa, and Australia, as well as the European Court of Human Rights, have grappled with these policies in the last decade. Chapters analyze partisan politics, political theory, prison administration, and social values, showing that constitutional law is the fruit of political and historical contingency, not just constitutional texts and formal legal doctrine.