Hey everyone. Welcome to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I’m your host, Callie, and I don’t know anything about anything. Come with me while I explore the world, and I’ll tell you everything you ever (and never) wanted to know, through the eyes of Gen Z.
Today’s episode: what crimes get counted as felonies, why felons can’t vote, and what we can do about it.
I hope this doesn’t surprise you, but I have never committed a felony. No one in my immediate family has ever been convicted of a crime, as far as I know. So, growing up, I was pretty far removed from the legal system. I essentially had no thoughts or opinions on laws, law enforcement, or incarceration until I was around 13, when I read Frank Abagnale and Stan Redding’s book, Catch Me If You Can. Frank Abagnale was a con artist who turned security consultant after finally being caught and sentenced in the USA. He served time in many countries, which gave me my first real views of what incarceration was like all over the world. In France, at the time, his crime sent him to solitary confinement in a dark room, where he was horribly abused. In Sweden, the focus was on rehabilitation, and a Swedish judge managed to convince the US to revoke his passport so he couldn’t be passed between countries to serve time anymore. Oddly enough, however, I don’t remember anything about his experiences in US prisons.
There are a lot of things wrong with the legal system. Many of those problems are why I stopped calling it the justice system. Many of those problems are racism problems. The 13th amendment to the constitution supposedly outlawed slavery, except as punishment for a crime. After it was ratified, the southern states started sentencing recently freed Black people to hard labor (aka, slavery) for minor or fabricated crimes, like loitering, shoplifting, or appearing threatening. Sounds familiar, right? Prisons are pretty screwed up, and at this point in my life, I’m leaning heavily towards a career in law so I can try to maybe make the justice system less screwed up.
This episode of the pod was inspired by a question I asked my dad the other day. While reading up on voting laws, I wondered why felons can’t vote. In some states, if you are convicted of a felony, you aren’t allowed to ever vote again. In some states, your voting rights can be restored after you finish serving your sentence. In my state, felons get their voting rights restored after they have completed prison, parole, and probation. I knew the basic answer as to why, which is that they’ve committed a crime and are being punished, but I wanted to know why revoking the right to vote was a go-to punishment for these people, and why the rules about it are different in different states. I wanted to know what motivated Florida and many others to revoke their voting rights permanently, and what motivated Vermont and Maine to allow felons to vote from prison. My dad didn’t have an answer for me, so I turned to Google.
On my research journey, my first step was clearing up exactly what being a “felon” meant, or what crimes are considered felonies. Crimes are usually classified in one of three ways: infraction, misdemeanor, and felony. A felony is the most severe type of crime. The severity of the crime is determined by the amount of jail time possible. Which sort of seems counterintuitive? Like, shouldn’t the amount of jail time be determined by the severity of the crime? I’m sure it’s more complex than my understanding of it.
Here, look at it this way. A first-time DUI offender with a blood alcohol content barely over the limit will generally face less jail time than a repeat offender way over the limit. Technically, they’ve committed the same crime: driving while drunk. But the first person would likely get less jail time, making it a misdemeanor, and the second would probably get a more severe punishment, making it a felony. This… doesn’t sit right with me. It’s too subjective. But we’ll get to problems with this system later. There’s only so much that written law can cover. We have human beings and judges and juries because every circumstance is different, and the law isn’t written in a way that covers every single possible situation in which a law can be broken.
So why do states make these laws anyway? A man named Roger Clegg puts it this way, “If you aren’t willing to follow the law, you can’t claim the right to make the law for everyone else.” Clegg is the President of the Center for Equal Opportunity, which is a “conservative advocacy group,” according to TIME magazine. I have a lot to say about this guy. First, if your group is called the Center for Equal Opportunity, why are you campaigning so hard to take opportunity away from people? Rebrand, dude. Rebrand. Second, the article I was reading about this was written in 2006, so I thought I was going to have to correct myself and say that he used to be the president of this group, but I looked it up and no, he’s still there. Of course he is. He’s an old white guy in a conservative political group. They tend to stick around.
The issue with his view comes from the simplicity in his statement. We just talked about how complex law interpretation is, so obviously, this can’t be as simple. If the issue was following the law, our first-time DUI offender from earlier would be just as guilty as our repeat offender, but only one would lose voting rights. Our boy Clegg here thinks, or at least said to The Heritage Foundation in 2018, that we need to make sure felons have really turned over a new leaf before they should be allowed to vote again, and, since many former prisoners commit another crime and return, it is clear that many have not been improved by incarceration.
This man gets so, SO close to actually having a point that it’s ridiculous to me that he didn’t see it. If the problem is about making sure people are improved by incarceration, then we should be designing incarceration to improve people, like with rehabilitation plans and educational opportunities. We had educational opportunities in many prisons for quite a while, and they were very successful. Then Bill Clinton cut their funding. You know who wrote a bill that Clinton signed. I hate to say it, but… Joe Biden. Ugh! Please vote for him anyway, there are secret police in Portland because of 45. Anyway. It’s never been about following the law. At this point in 2020, we should all know what the elephant in the room is here. It’s race. Don’t worry, I’ll get to that. But first, a little more context.
I don’t know if you noticed when I started talking about Roger Clegg, but we got dangerously close to dehumanization there. The rhetoric shifted from “people who have committed crimes” to “prisoners.” The conversation changed from upholding and restoring voting rights to “improving people,” like they’re animals and have no say in their own lives. Of course they have no say. They can’t vote. When we stop thinking of each other as people, we stop caring. The people living in prisons around the country are as human as you and me. We aren’t different. If you struggle to think of yourself as having anything in common with a criminal, that’s okay. Stick around. We’ll unpack that.
So, if these people have committed a severe crime and are being sent to jail for a long time, why do we care if they can vote or not? Well, there’s about 5.3 million of them, for one thing. That’s almost twice the number of people living in Chicago. That’s a little more than the population of Los Angeles. That’s a huge chunk of the population who can’t vote, a huge number of Americans who aren’t being represented. Reason number two, they’re counted in the census. That means they’re counted when governments decide how many voting districts there are and how many representatives each state gets.
So they are technically represented by a person in Congress, but they get no say in who that person is or what they do. Something about this reminds me of one of America’s core values. Something about… no taxation without representation? Seems like we’re real mad about that until it comes to people who have committed crimes. Reason number three, they’re people. There was a Huffington post article written in 2017 with a consistently relevant title that I’m sure many of you have heard before. It reads: “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people.” That’s basically where I am with this.
There’s a poem with similar vibes as the HuffPost title. I read it in an English class once, I’m pretty sure. It’s called “First They Came” and it was written by a German pastor directly after World War 2 criticizing the cowardice of the German people who didn’t speak out against the injustices that the Nazis were performing. The general take is that they’ll come for everyone (they being the government/Nazis, everyone being the Jewish people, the socialists, the political instigators), and you don’t speak up because it doesn’t matter to you. But then, when they come for you, nobody will be left to speak up for you. I recommend reading it, even if you’ve read it before. Sometimes we all need a reminder that to be silent is to be complicit.
As I researched this issue, a thought pulled at my brain again and again, fed by my newly curated social media feed and the books on the shelf beside me. I read about how crimes are deemed misdemeanors or felonies, and the thought whispered, “Isn’t it about race?” I read about the lack of educational opportunities in prison, and the thought whispered, “Isn’t it about race?” I looked at the maps of felon voting rights and compared them to the maps of red vs blue states, and the thought whispered, “Isn’t it about race?”
I ignored that thought. Each time it came up, I brushed it aside, thinking, “I need to know more. Surely there’s more to the story. Wait.” Wait. Hasn’t that thought waited long enough? Isn’t 400 years long enough. I ignored it because the system I grew up in taught me that it isn’t about race. But it is about race. It has always been about race.
What makes a crime a felony? Jail time. Black people get disproportionately longer sentences than white people for the same crimes. Do you remember that scandal last year where a ton of rich people were bribing college admissions to get their kids into better schools? Apparently it has a name, it was called Operation Varsity Blues. The longest prison sentence awarded for those crimes was six months, with a 2 year period of supervision afterwards. The actual crimes they were charged with were, quote, “Felony conspiracy to commit mail fraud, honest services mail fraud, and money laundering.” Basically, crimes that should’ve gotten more than six months. Most of the prison sentences were like 15 days or around that mark. All the people involved were white.
In 2011, a Black woman was arrested for sending her kids to school in another district, and she was sentenced to 10 days in jail and 3 years of probation afterwards. In 2019, the same time as Operation Varsity Blues, a woman got 5 years in prison for using a friend’s address to enroll her child in a different school district. Her sentence also included the sale of narcotics. Drugs. I don’t have the time or the ability to eloquently explain why drugs shouldn’t get a 5 year prison sentence, especially when I watch white kids make drug deals at school and no one bats an eye.
Go watch the documentary 13th on Netflix. Or YouTube. 13th taught me about the prison industrial complex, and reading Angela Davis’s book Are Prisons Obsolete? taught me even more. I asked for some hot takes on this topic on Twitter, and my friend Ronan had a great take. Here, I’ll read it to you. He said, “Felon disenfranchisement is an extension of the attempt by privatized prisons to cement discrimination in politics to ensure that the interests of the prison owners are always represented.” He’s very smart and going to college soon, so let me break that down for you. Private prisons make a lot of money when there are people in them. Private prisons give politicians a lot of money to make sure that there are laws that keep people in prison. Politicians like money, so they find ways to criminalize things like being poor and being black, because it’s not like those things will go away. Restricting voting rights keeps those politicians in power.
Basically, it’s always about race. The people in Operation Varsity Blues will probably be able to appeal to get their voting rights restored. They’ll be able to complete their little jail sentences and “supervision” times, whatever that means, and easily pay their court fees to get all record of “felon” wiped away. But the people who committed the same or lesser crimes, the Black people, won’t find it so easy, or even possible, to get their voting rights restored. We say we have equal voting rights in this country, that everyone can vote regardless of race or gender. But the people in power will always find ways of suppressing the vote of people they don’t want around. And with felony voting laws, they can legally do that.
So what can we do about it? First and foremost, vote. Vote vote vote. Go register to vote right now. Make sure you’re registered if you already did it. Request your absentee ballot. Fill it out. Send it in. Don’t wait until November 3rd. Go go go.
Write to your representatives. My boy Thom Tillis has received essentially an email a day from me. Today’s was about the travel ban on Muslim countries. His responses are never very encouraging and I’m probably not changing his mind at all, but still. Stir up trouble. Somebody has to read that email. Someone has to answer that call.
Thank you for listening to this particularly political episode of Fast Facts for Gen Z. Subscribe or follow this podcast for more, or head over to Twitter and follow me @FastFactsPod to tweet me your ideas of things I should talk about. This is Callie, signing off.
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