A thought-provoking look at one population's loss of voting rights in the United States.

In fourteen states some or all former prisoners who have completed their sentences, their paroles, and the terms of their probation are prohibited from voting. This short book provides an overview of the history, nature, and consequences of denying ex-felons the right to vote. Readers learn of state practices, the arguments that have been used in court houses, legislatures, and the press to justify disenfranchisement, and the attempts to remedy the situation through recourse to state and federal governments. Elizabeth Hull enumerates the disproportionate effect of these policies on African-Americans and the ways current criminal justice practices cause those effects. The book contains an Appendix on the 2004 election.

The book analyzes a contemporary policy question at the nexus of democracy, criminal justice, and constitutional citizenship.

"Mr. Manza and Mr. Uggen... wade into one of the most contested empirical debates in political science: How many (if any) recent American elections would have gone differently if all former felons had been allowed to vote?"--The Chronicle of Higher Education. Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, who understand the vastness of the jailers' reach, follow the story out of the cell and into the voting booth. Locked Out examines how the disenfranchisement of felons shapes American democracyhardly a hypothetical matter in an age of split electorates and hanging chads.... Exacting and fair, their work should persuade even those who come to the subject skeptically that an injustice is at hand.The New York Review of Books. 5.4 million Americans--1 in every 40 voting age adultsare denied the right to participate in democratic elections because of a past or current felony conviction. In several American states, 1 in 4 black men cannot vote due to a felony conviction. In a country that prides itself on universal suffrage, how did the United States come to deny a voice to such a large percentage of its citizenry? What are the consequences of large-scale disenfranchisement--for election outcomes, for the reintegration of former offenders back into their communities, and for public policy more generally? Locked Out exposes one of the most important, yet little known, threats to the health of American democracy today. It reveals the centrality of racial factors in the origins of these laws, and their impact on politics today. Marshalling the first real empirical evidence on the issue to make a case for reform, the authors' path-breaking analysis will inform all future policy and political debates on the laws governing the political rights of criminals.

Living in Infamy uncovers the origins of felon disfranchisement and traces the expansion of the practice to felons regardless of race and its spread beyond the South, establishing a system that affects the American electoral process today.

At the start of the twenty-first century, 1 percent of the U.S. population is behind bars. An additional 3 percent is on parole or probation. In all but two states, incarcerated felons cannot vote, and in three states felon disenfranchisement is for life. More than 5 million adult Americans cannot vote because of a felony-class criminal conviction, meaning that more than 2 percent of otherwise eligible voters are stripped of their political rights. Nationally, fully a third of the disenfranchised are African American, effectively disenfranchising 8 percent of all African Americans in the United States. In Alabama, Kentucky, and Florida, one in every five adult African Americans cannot vote. Punishment and Inclusion gives a theoretical and historical account of this pernicious practice of felon disenfranchisement, drawing widely on early modern political philosophy, continental and postcolonial political thought, critical race theory, feminist philosophy, disability theory, critical legal studies, and archival research into state constitutional conventions. It demonstrates that the history of felon disenfranchisement, rooted in postslavery restrictions on suffrage and the contemporaneous emergence of the modern “American” penal system, reveals the deep connections between two political institutions often thought to be separate, showing the work of membership done by the criminal punishment system and the work of punishment done by the electoral franchise. Felon disenfranchisement is a symptom of the tension that persists in democratic politics between membership and punishment. This book shows how this tension is managed via the persistence of white supremacy in contemporary regimes of punishment and governance.

Two reports on the issue of felony disenfranchisement. The 1st report provides an update on the legal, legislative, and community initiatives undertaken to restore or preserve felons1 and ex-felons1 voting rights, as well as those initiatives that seek to limit or ban voting rights. Also examines the often confusing and cumbersome restoration procedures in several states. The 2nd report, 3Losing the Vote: The Impact of Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the U.S.,2 includes the first 50-state survey of the impact of U.S. criminal disenfranchisement laws. No other democratic country in the world denies as many people -- in absolute or proportional terms -- the right to vote because of felony convictions.