Sasha Abramsky is a journalist who has written for numerous magazine and newspapers, including: The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and the London Independent. He is a graduate of Balliol College at Oxford University, and earned his masters from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.
Currently Abramsky is a Senior Fellow at the New York City-based Demos Foundation, which is a national non-partisan public policy organization. His new book Conned: How Millions Went to Prison, Lost the Vote, and Helped Send George W. Bush to the White House was just published by the New Press.
I reached Abramsky in Sacramento, California, where he lives with his wife Julie Sze and their daughter Sophia.
Gerry McCarthy: Early in Conned you write about the historical roots of disenfranchisement in the U.S. You explain that: "Felon disenfranchisement, in other words, is not a mere side effect of misguided social policies or strategies of law enforcement. Rather, pruning the voter rolls has been, in the view of a significant portion of the American power elite since the end of the Civil War, a good in and of itself." Do you think there's more recognition of the importance of putting this issue in historical context?
Sasha Abramsky: There's beginning to be more awareness. But if you're going to talk about the history, I should explain why it's important. It's easy to say: The disenfranchisement comes about as an utterly unintended side effect of changes in the way we sentence people. In other words: As more people have gone to prison almost accidentally we disenfranchise more people, and there's no historical context and we don't need to understand the roots of these laws.
To a degree it's true that a large number of states did almost accidentally disenfranchise people. For example: They weren't thinking consciously that it would lead to disenfranchisement when they launched the war on drugs.
But at that same time, unless you understand the historical context you don't understand how fragile our current notion of democracy is. What I mean by that is: At the moment we equate democracy --almost without any hesitation-- with universal adult suffrage. It's almost definitional at this point. That's an extremely recent notion. You only have to go back a few generations and at least in Europe you have property qualifications on the vote. And you only have to go back a few more generations in America (into the Jacksonian period) and you have property restrictions on the vote too.
More recently than the Jacksonian period you have the poll tax, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses. These laws were part of Jim Crow that were explicitly designed to racialize voting rights to minimize the participation of blacks.
If you look at many of the post-Civil War state constitutions in the Southern part of the United States, the disenfranchisement of felons was seen by crafters of those laws in the South as very much in keeping with the rest of the Jim Crow package. It was an explicit way to legally disenfranchise black voters. The state constitution writers at that time made no bones about it.
That's why the history is important. Not necessarily because it impacts the way people behave today. But because it shows where these laws come from, and explains the kind of effects these laws are likely to have.
GM: Early in the book you write about interviewing Florida House Speaker Tom Feeney, a Republican and staunch opponent of restoring the rights of felons who'd completed their sentences. You quote him expressing his reservations about universal suffrage. Feeney said: "At some point you have to ask yourself whether or not an electorate that is increasingly less likely to be literate, whether an expansion of the franchise to just everyone who has two arms and legs, is the best way to govern a democracy for the future." You were amazed at his response weren't you?
SA: I wasn't so much amazed that he thought these things. I was amazed that he'd say these things. That particular quote is from an article I did shortly after the 2000 presidential election for Rolling Stone magazine. It was at the height of the controversy around access to the ballot in Florida and all the machinations around the election in Florida. I was just amazed that he was candid enough to say this. It was an eye-opener that in the South it's still acceptable to debate the basic concepts of universal suffrage.
I'll come back to the history again. That kind of statement would have been entirely familiar to an old Southern denizen in the 1890s or the early 1900s. It would have been entirely familiar to the middle class politician in England in Victorian times. But it's not something we tend to think is a live issue at the moment. We tend to think we had that debate --and the debate is over. In other words: The people who advocated universal suffrage as a philosophy of democracy won. What amazed me was the fact that in parts of the country --and segments of the population-- that debate is still very much alive.
GM: In the book you write that: "I've thought for awhile now that the New England political roots of contemporary America have gradually been taken over by the spreading tendrils of Southern political culture --albeit one carefully tailored to a postsegragationist civil-rights era-- in particular the corrupt political culture of Florida and self-aggrandizing, strutting politics of Texas." Can you talk to me a bit more about this?
SA: What I was trying to say there is that a host of social and economic policies --of which criminal justice policies are a larger part-- have radically changed the way the American state functions in the last quarter-century. It's radically changed our understanding of the social compact and everything from the role of the state in regulating the environment, enforcing minimum wage law, through to the power (or lack of power) of trade unions.
Increasingly as the South has gained political influence both within the Republican Party --and by extension nationally (the post-Barry Goldwater revolution in the Republican Party)-- we've seen the values that historically defined the South are coming to the fore here. There is a caveat. The Republican Party isn't overtly or explicitly racist the way the old South was. They've done something very effective. They've absorbed all of the economic and conservative social policies (and much of the religious priorities of the South), but they've done it in a way where they can claim to be race neutral.
But the impact is that if you look at the criminal justice system, historically it's the South that has pushed the larger prison sentences, for ever harsher prison conditions, and for the disenfranchisement of felons. The impact is massively and disproportionately on the African-American population. For example: With disenfranchisement --and as the criminal justice system has become larger-- throughout much of the South you now see that between a quarter and a third of all black males have lost the right to vote. That's amazing to me. That's very much like the re-introduction --by the back door-- of the Jim Crow system.
GM: You write about how Iowa's Republican leadership decided the best way to prevent felon disenfranchisement reform was simply to prevent change from being debated. You add that in virtually every state that has preserved permanent disenfranchisement provisions in recent years, you don't find politicians loudly proclaiming their defence of such laws. Instead "they'll quietly kill reform using technical maneuvers and hope nobody notices." Did this surprise you?
SA: No, because outside of the old South it is largely inappropriate to explicitly question the principles of universal adult suffrage. Even in the old South it's increasingly uncomfortable to talk about. You're rarely going to have someone as frank as Tom Feeney questioning the principles of universal suffrage.
What happens is that philosophically these disenfranchisement laws are hard to defend. What's easy to do is to either frame it as a soft-on-crime versus a tough-on-crime maneuver. Then you say: Anybody who preaches any kind of reform of any aspect of the criminal justice system is "soft on crime." That's one way to neutralize it. The other way is to simply prevent it (to as great an extent as possible) from being debated in the open.
What happened in Iowa --and in a number of other states-- is that once the laws began to be challenged it was awkward for the Republican leadership (or any other politicians --because it isn't just a Republican-Democrat divide) to get up and explicitly issue a philosophical defence of disenfranchisement. So they would table these maneuvers. They'd attach all these amendments, and make it as uncomfortable as possible hoping the reform itself would sputter to an inglorious close where nothing would happen.
GM: Numerous times in the book you write how people would tell you that ex-felons who've been disenfranchised probably wouldn't vote anyway. How do you respond to this?
SA: This is a question you hear many times. In other words: Why should we care about these people? It's a theoretical issue: Even if they could vote --they wouldn't-- so what's the big deal? Politicians tell you that, and especially conservative politicians. A wide variety of social moralizers will tell you that too. It's not an uncommon assumption, and it's just not true. You only find out it's not true when you actually talk with people who've been disenfranchised. You'll find there's a cross-section of the population and some of them --just like others who've never been convicted of a crime-- are utterly apolitical. On the other hand there's a huge number of people out there (and I talked with them in every state I went to) who are desperately keen to vote. Some of these people were political going into prison, and have always understood the political system and participated. They just want to get back to what they were doing before they were incarcerated.
There were others who were apolitical and prison politicized them. They come out of prison and they want to participate. But they don't want to participate in a "felon's block." They don't want to organize around the issues of crime and criminality. They want to organize themselves usually around the issue of poverty. That's what I found. I talked with women in drug rehabilitation centres in Iowa and taxi drivers in Tennessee. I talked with a huge number of people all over the country. The ones that were interested in voting overwhelmingly talked about issues of economics. They wanted to participate in decisions affecting taxes and how their children were educated. That's an important thing to realize. There's no single "ex-prisoner" or "ex-felon." It's good shorthand. But it's not good shorthand for an understanding of how people would vote (if they could vote) or which kind of political issues concern them.
GM: In the last chapter you write about returning to Florida for the 2004 election results. You write about a friend telling you that it looked very possible that Senator Kerry could win. But I suspect you weren't convinced?
SA: I was probably more convinced than I should have been. I'd gone around Florida and saw these absolutely enormous lines of people waiting to vote early. It was a political engagement that I've rarely seen before. A lot of commentators were saying that the higher the turnout the better this was going to be for the Democrats. With hindsight this was probably a bit over simplistic for many reasons, not least because there was a huge untapped pool of evangelical voters that the Republicans could mobilize.
On the other hand, one of the Democrats core constituencies are low-income people of all colour, but especially low-income African Americans. And a huge number of those people literally cannot vote anymore. So it's possible that the Democrats mobilized to their maximum extent possible, and ran into the fact that many millions of potential voters were disenfranchised.
I wrestled with the last chapter, because this isn't a partisan issue per se. There is an overwhelming and theoretical and philosophical argument in favour of re-enfranchisement of ex-prisoners no matter what their political affiliation. There's just a theoretical argument that the way we understand modern democracy is incompatible with permanent disenfranchisement.
On the other hand, in my book I make it clear that government by these very conservative politicians --embodied by the George W. Bush administration-- has done tremendous damage to America. I felt that the electoral system was (to a degree) malfunctioning, partly because so many people were being disenfranchised. So I felt sad about the outcome in 2004.
GM: In that chapter you explain that the Republicans won Iowa in 2004 by "a mere 14,000 votes."
SA: There are several states in the mid-west and west where disenfranchisement probably had made it at least easier for the Republicans in the Electoral College. Those states were: Nevada, New Mexico, and Iowa. Normally those states don't mean as much in elections, because they're small states. But in the last two elections-- because of the closeness of the Electoral College vote-- all three states have been vital.
GM: You write that if Nevada, New Mexico, and Iowa had gone to the Democrats the Electoral College for the U.S. presidency in 2004 would have been tied.
SA: That's absolutely true, but you have to acknowledge that in the last election Bush apparently won a relatively large majority of the absolute votes cast. If you're in opposition to Bush do you respond to that by re-tailoring your politics to try and win away hardcore conservative supporters of his? Or do you try and broaden the franchise so that people who aren't voting can vote, and so people who can vote (but haven't voted because they're alienated from the system) feel they have something to vote for?
GM: In your postscript you explain that disenfranchisement laws have been reformed in some states over the past few years. But in Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Virginia, and Florida things remain the same. Is that right?
SA: Yes. What you're seeing is that in the states where there are live histories of reform movements --especially in the west and mid-western states-- once enough attention began to be paid to this issue in the wake of the 2000 election, a momentum began developing for (at least) limited reform. The reform varies. For example: New Mexico pretty much eradicated its permanent disenfranchisement law. On the other hand, Nevada changed their law, but did so with significant opposition from conservative politicians. So their changes were marginal.
In most of the instances where the change has taken place, it hasn't been accompanied by a public education campaign. To a large extent it's straw man, because there are a huge number of ex-felons who now can vote, but they don't know they can. But at least the law has changed.
In the South the laws haven't changed. In a sense the issue is being clarified. The states where it existed almost by accident as an historical leftover --have abolished it. The hardcore Southern states where this has always been a key component of their political system (and where it was most explicitly used to prune the franchise) are those states where it remains.
You're seeing the debate acquire its true colours at this point. It's being reduced to the bare essentials which come down to a philosophical argument over the extent of the franchise. In a sense, you're seeing disenfranchisement re-ghettoized in the South. That makes it a more interesting debate, because it hones the argument.
GM: Do you think the disenfranchisement issue will have some priority in the 2006 mid-term elections or the 2008 presidential election?
SA: I doubt it, because there are too many other issues that are going to crowd it out in 2006. It will be a live political event in the 2008 presidential election, because it's much easier --both viscerally and statistically-- to show the impact it's been having on presidential elections in the past few cycles (especially in Florida).
My guess is what you'll see over the next two years is progressive pressure at the state level. Especially emanating out of the black caucuses at the state level. There's also pressure to intervene at least to protect the franchise for federal elections. There's talk about that in Congress at the moment.
I'd say in 2006 it will be a small issue. Whereas in 2008 I think it will be a large issue. A bigger issue in 2006 might be the growing controversy over the way in which electoral re-districting has been going on for years. That seems to be --surprisingly-- going against the Republican Party.
GM: Another important matter you address in the book is the "war on drugs" and how America deals with non-violent crime. Can you talk to me a bit about this?
SA: Historically we made a conscious choice as a society (and you can take it back to the Nixon years, but more explicitly the Reagan years) that we were going to criminalize more drug related behaviour as opposed to medicalizing it --which was the direction taken by a lot of other countries. Also: As social inequalities rose (and they've been rising spectacularly in all measures from hunger through to the division from lowest to highest paid work and to literacy among the lowest classes) we chose to deal with the side affects that followed through incarceration. We essentially changed the prison system from being this relatively self-contained small system that was used sparingly and generally as a last resort --into a first-tier welfare system. If we couldn't deal with poverty on the outside we just locked it up.
What you see now is a vast number of people who in other countries wouldn't be incarcerated (and in other moments in U.S. history wouldn't be incarcerated) going into prison. As a society we then spend a huge amount of money to lock these people up. We spend $20,000 to $40,000 per person every year to lock them up. But it doesn't provide the services that are needed to help them when they come back to the community. So you end up with this cycle of people who for all intents and purposes are going to spend much of their working life going back and forth between prison and the street. That has a huge impact both economically and politically.
I talked about the legal literary tests, and the idea that these are undereducated people and it's very hard for them to navigate all the paperwork to have their vote restored. Obviously an ideal situation would be that everybody should be educated. You don't want a society of undereducated people. But given that our social policies aren't producing the desired level of literacy and education in our society --you can't then further penalize those people by making this massive intellectual obstacle to cross for people to get their political rights restored.
GM: You literally travelled across the U.S. doing research for the book. You interviewed lawmakers, ex-felons, and activists. What hopeful things did you see that you didn't expect?
SA: The most hopeful thing was that I found more people were politically involved in this issue that I assumed going in. Also: There were a tremendous number of community activists and politicians out there working hard to change these laws. What I didn't encounter was acquiescence. That's important. This has become a live issue, and it's become an issue people are wrestling with and trying to put on the agenda. I found that hopeful.
Gerry McCarthy is Editor of The Social Edge.
Credit for photograph of Sasha Abramsky: Rob Klein
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