Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day. To commemorate the occasion, National Public Radio’s Fresh Air broadcast this interview with Ohio State University law professor Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Alexander argues that the mass incarceration of African-Americans in the war on drugs strips such persons of the rights thought won in the civil rights movement, among them the right to vote. Disagreement about whether convicted felons’ right to vote should be restored also surfaced in Monday’s Republican presidential debate in South Carolina when Rick Santorum asked Mitt Romney whether felons “who served their time” should be able to vote. Romney said he didn’t “think people who ha[d]committed violent crimes should be allowed to vote again.” CNN followed up with this on-line poll seeking readers’ opinions as to whether convicted felons should be allowed to vote. More than half of the respondents said yes, 13 percent of them indicating that felons should be able to vote while still serving their sentences. CNN prefaced the poll by recounting arguments for and against the disenfranchisement of felons and by acknowledging its disproportionate effect on African American voters. CNN reported that “twenty-three states have eased felon voting restrictions since 1997, but in 2011, Florida and Iowa tightened them.” (Hat Tip: Sentencing Law and Policy). North Carolina has for decades provided for the automatic restoration of a convicted felon’s citizenship rights, including the right to vote, upon the person’s unconditional discharge from prison or from [...]
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