[Marxism] "Those People in That Prison Can't Vote Me Out"

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

PrisonersoftheCensus.org: <http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/index.shtml>

*****   "Those People in That Prison Can't Vote Me Out":
The Political Consequences of Racist Felony Disenfranchisement

By Paul Street

. . . 4.4 million Americans are disenfranchised due to a past or current
felony conviction.  No other nation imprisons a larger share of its
population or marks so large a share of its population with the lifelong
mark of a serious (felony) criminal record.  According to the best
estimates last year, 13 million Americans – fully 7 percent of the adult
population and an astonishing 12 percent of the adult male population –
possess felony records.

At the same time, no other democratic nation denies the vote to a
remotely comparable share of its offender and ex-offender population.
According to Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, the leading academic
authorities on felon and ex-felon voting rights, "48 states
disenfranchise incarcerated felons, 37 states disenfranchise felony
probationers or parolees (or both), and 14 states additionally
disenfranchise some or all ex-felons who have completed their
sentences."  America’s army of disenfranchised felons and ex-felons "are
expected," note Manza and Uggen, "to respect the law (and indeed, are
often subject to significantly harsher penalties and face a higher level
of scrutiny, than non-felons).  They are expected to pay taxes to the
government, and to be governed by elected officials.  Yet they have no
formal right to participate in the selection of those officials or the
public policies that allocate government expenditures."  Among those
expenditures we might include the hundreds of billions of dollars that
American governments spend on mass surveillance, arrest, detention,
prosecution, incarceration, and post-release criminal supervision. . . .

The central factor is that imprisonment and related felony-marking in
the US have "changed," in Northwestern University sociologist Devah
Pager's words, "from a punishment reserved for only the most heinous
offenders to one extended to a much greater range of crimes and much
larger segment of the population."  People who committed nonviolent,
especially drug crimes accounted for more than three fourths of the
nation's increase in prisoners between 1978 and 1996.

These trends have impacted black communities with special harshness.
While blacks make up just 15 percent of illicit drug users, they account
for 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses.  They comprise 42
percent of those held in federal prison for drug charges and 62 percent
of those in state prisons.  Blacks constituted more than 75 percent of
the total drug prisoners in America in one third of all states according
to a report issued in 2000 by the prestigious human rights organization
Human Rights Watch.  Black crime rates have been consistently higher
than the white crime rate, consistent with blacks' lower socioeconomic
status and related higher stress levels and weaker social and familial
structures, but there has been no massive upsurge of black criminality
that could even remotely explain the skyrocketing black incarceration
and felony rates. . . .

To get a sense of how this plays out in terms of racial political power,
consider some numbers from my own home state.  The Chicago metropolitan
area is home to 83 percent of the state's African-Americans and point of
origin for 70 percent of the state's prisoners.  Nearly two thirds (64
percent) of the state's 45, 629 prisoners in 2001 were African-American,
a percentage more than four timers greater than blacks' share of
Illinois' population. Forty-four percent of the state's prisoners are
African Americans from Chicago’s Cook County.  Eighteen of the twenty
adult correctional facilities constructed over the last two decades in
Illinois are located in counties that are disproportionately white for
the state.  Just four of the state's twenty post-1980 prison towns have
above-average black populations for the state but in three of those this
is only because they get to report prisoners as part of their
population.  Five of the six adult Illinois correctional centers
constructed in the 1990s are located in the southern third of the state.
Visitors to such very visibly white downstate towns as Ina, Illinois
(home of the Big Muddy Correctional Center), would be surprised to learn
from the Census Bureau that that community is 42 percent
African-American and 90 percent male. The explanation, of course, is
mass incarceration.

It’s not enough, apparently that each black prisoner is worth tens of
thousands of economic development dollars.  According to distinguished
criminologist Todd Clear, writing in 1996, the prison boom fed by the
rising “market” of Black offenders is in fact a remarkable economic
multiplier for communities that are often far removed from urban
minority concentrations.  “Each prisoner,” he found “represents as much
as $25,000 in income [annually] for the community in which the prison is
located, not to mention the value of constructing the prison facility in
the first place.  This,” Clear says, amounts to “a massive transfer of
value [emphasis added].”

Part of this “massive transfer,” it should be added, includes state and
federal funding allotments granted on the basis of census counts,
weighted to increase with the size of a jurisdiction’s poverty
population (and most prisoners are poor).  An investigation by The
Chicago Reporter, an excellent local public affairs magazine, finds that
racially disparate mass incarceration’s interaction with the geography
of prison construction, political districting rules and federal
budgetary practices to cost Chicago’s Cook County nearly $88 million in
federal benefits between 2000 and 2010 (see Molly Dugan, “Census Dollars
Bring bounty to Prison Towns”).  None of that money redounds to the
benefit of those who are responsible for it, of course – the prisoners
who do not get to drive on the improved roads or enjoy the improved
services built and provided with federal and state grants that rise with
mass imprisonment’s inflationary impact on local and regional census counts.

All of which provides some interesting context for a Chicago Tribune
story that bears the perverse title “Towns Put Dreams in Prisons.”
(Chicago Tribune, March 20, 2001, 2C:1).  In “downstate” Hoopeston,
Illinois, the Tribune reported, there was “talk of the mothballed
canneries that once made this a boom town and whether any of that
bustling spirit might return if the Illinois Department of Corrections
comes to town.”

“You don’t like to think about incarceration,” Hoopeston’s Mayor told
the Tribune, “but this is an opportunity for Hoopeston.  We’ve been
plagued by plant closings.”  The Hoopeston Mayor’s willingness to enter
the prison sweepstakes was validated by another small town mayor, Andy
Hutchens of Ina, Illinois.  According to the Tribune, in a passage that
reminds us to include diversion of tax revenue among the ways that mass
incarceration steals wealth from the inner city:

Before [Ina’s] prison was built, the city took in just $17,000 a year in
motor fuel tax revenue.  Now the figure is more like $72,000.  Last
year’s municipal budget appropriation was $380,000.  More than half of
that money is prison revenue.  Streets that were paved in chipped gravel
and oil for generations soon will all be covered in asphalt.  And
$850,000 community center that doubles as a gym and computer lab for the
school across the street is being paid for with prison money, Hutchens
said.  Because state and federal tax revenue is figured per capita, a
prison population that puts no strains on village services is a
permanent windfall for a little town such as Ina, Hutchens said.  “It
really figures out this way.  This little town of 450 people is getting
the tax money of a town of 2,700,” Hutchens told the Tribune, and then
added with a grin, “_And those people in that prison can’t vote me out
of office_.” [emphasis added].

The same sort of developmental perversity is certainly underway in other
states, including New York, where 66% of a disproportionately black
state inmate population comes from New York City but 91 percent of
prisoners are housed in “upstate” prisons.  Every single New York state
prison built since 1982 has been constructed in an “upstate” community
and 34 New York State Assembly districts are based in part on prisoners
(see Peter Wagner’s useful The Prison Index, Prison Policy Initiative,
2003, pp. 38-39).  According to a recent Prison Policy Initiative study
titled “Importing Constituents: Prison and Political Clout in New York,”
prisoners make up 7 percent of a recently formed New York Assembly
district belonging to New York Redistricting Taskforce member Chris
Ortloff.  Of the nearly 6,000 black adults in Ortloff’s district, 82.6
percent are barred by law from ever voting for or against him because
they are prisoners. . . .

Paul Street (pstreet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) is an urban social policy
researcher in Chicago, Illinois.  He writes on class, race, imperialism
and thought control.  He is the author of The Vicious Circle: Race,
Prisons, and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation (available
online at www.cul-chicago.org)

<http://www.blackcommentator.org/68/68_street_prisons_pf.html>   *****




_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism