Free Indeed To Vote

[L. Coyote]

Free Indeed To Vote
Kara Gotsch - February 23, 2007
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/02/23/free_indeed_to_vote.php

Kara Gotsch is the director of advocacy for The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice reform organization based in Washington, DC.

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Andres Idarraga , a 29-year-old junior at Brown University and a prominent activist in Providence, finally won his right to vote on Election Day, 2006. Idarraga was incarcerated for six-and-a-half years and believes the right to vote is a significant and crucial aspect to rebuilding his life and to contributing to his community......

The Rhode Island campaign is but the latest victory in a national movement to expand voting rights to people with felony records—an estimated 5.3 million Americans. Forty-eight states (all but Maine and Vermont) and the District of Columbia prohibit inmates from voting while incarcerated for a felony offense. In 35 states, people on parole also cannot vote. And, in the dozen most regressive states, the right to vote can be permanently denied to people with felony records. Nationally, 74 percent of the disenfranchised population lives in the community, including two million who have completed their sentence.

During the Jim Crow era, disenfranchisement laws in southern states were revised to silence the political voice of newly emancipated slaves. Today, racial disparities in the criminal justice system contribute to dramatic rates of felony disenfranchisement for African Americans. Thirteen percent of black men are disenfranchised and as many as 40 percent of black men are projected to lose their right to vote in states that disenfranchise after completion of sentence. Disproportionate disenfranchisement in communities of color means the concerns of those communities are not fairly represented at the polls. .....

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