THIS RIGHT HERE
You guys are dangerously close to realizing specifically what kinds of people they keep from voting and why.
I want to drill this into everybody’s head:
The United States of America has the highest prison population in the world
Black Americans and Latin people make up the majority of this population (many of whom are non-violent offenders)
Federal Prisons in America require that their state keeps their prisons at a maximum occupancy at all times.
The 13th amendment did not entirely abolish slavery…just one form of it. It remains legal through industrial prison system
Oh and we have privatized prisons which allow companies to actually make money off of keeping people incarcerated
Here’s what’s really perverse: prisoners, who cannot vote, still get counted in the U.S. Census. The more prisoners a county has, the more representation it gets, even though the prisoners cannot vote. See how that works? The more black and brown people they lock up, the more government resources and political representation they get. Even though those prisoners have no say and cannot vote.
If county-A has a population of 50 voters but no prisons, and county-B has a population of 50 voters and 50 prisoners, the county with the prisoners gets more government funding and more political represention. This is sometimes called “prison gerrymandering” and it is used in redistrictring.
Not so fun Fact: Southern states that reliably vote for Republicans also have the highest prison population in the United States. (source). So mass incarceration is a double whammy. It’s both a form of voter suppression and a tool to strengthen white people’s political power.
I’d also like to drop recommendations for The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness and Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.
They both tackle the historical evolution of modern-day mass incarceration (e.g. slavery giving way to convict leasing giving way to the modern prison-industrial complex & for-profit prisons) and how it relates to voter disenfranchisement.
We provide the New Jim Crow as a free PDF under our social justice resources alongside several hundred other racial injustice and prison abolition resources here.
