By Nitya Gupta ‘23, Social Justice Writer

While Election Day 2020 will be remembered for Joe Biden’s victory for the highest office in the land, it also marked a historic win for felons and ex-convicts with the passing of Proposition 17 in California. Prop. 17–a state constitutional amendment that allows people on parole for felonies to vote–has re-enfranchised about 50,000 parolees in the state of California. With this amendment, California joined the group of 21 states that authorized parolees the right to vote, a significant step towards securing a more equal democracy. However, the sad reality remains that more than half of the states in America have harsher felony disenfranchisement policies, where even one year of imprisonment could deny someone the right to vote forever. Furthermore, it reveals one of the many flaws in this country’s criminal justice system: the deeply rooted systemic racism that has allowed such large scale voter suppression to persist for decades. 

Since 1976, the disenfranchisement rate has risen by over 1.7 million, climaxing at 6.2 million people in 2016 as the US prison population continues to grow. Out of this, approximately 2.2 million African Americans, about 1 in every 16 black citizens, are banned from voting due to racially motivated disenfranchisement policies. However, this comes as no surprise, as America has had a long history of suppressing black and brown communities at the ballot box. The Post-Reconstruction era saw the emergence of Jim Crow legislation that targeted crimes believed to be made most commonly by the black population. This meant that states like Mississipi tried to remove the right to vote for petty theft and arson but completely disregarded murder. White supremacy was written intentionally into state constitutions of Southern states like Alabama, Florida, and Virginia in an attempt to diminish minority representation, or to quote Delegate Carter Glass in 1901, “eliminate the darkie as a political factor in this state.” 

Felony disenfranchisement is centered at the heart of our legal system, even appearing in the Fourteenth Amendment. Ironically enough, the very bill with the Equal Protection Clause that presented former slaves with citizenship also denied people one of the fundamental rights that came with it. Section 2 refuses the right to vote for “participation in rebellion or other crime,” a technicality exploited by the opposition for years. In the 1974 court case Richardson v. Ramirez, the US Supreme Court used this escape clause to declare the laws that barred convicted criminals from voting to be constitutional. 

However, it seems like California has come a long way from these discriminatory laws. Taina Vargas-Edmond, a co-founder of Initiate Justice and executive chair in the Yes on Prop 17 campaign called the proposition a “victory for democracy and justice. For far too long, black and brown Californians have been excluded from our democracy. Today, California voters definitively righted a historic wrong.” Additionally, studies have shown that the restoration of voting rights and civic participation directly correlates with lower rates of repeated offenses and helps reintegrate former prisoners back into their communities. 

There seems to be a growing revolutionary campaign happening throughout the country, with other states like Iowa and Louisiana recently revoking many of the previous restrictions placed on convicts. The Black Lives Matter movement has also increased visibility on the predatory nature of America’s mass incarceration system towards marginalized communities of color. Moreover, Kamala Harris, the new Vice-President Elect and the first woman of color in such a position, was a vocal supporter of Proposition 17. As this becomes a more hot topic issue in the current political climate, civil rights advocates everywhere are wondering: will America see a larger reformist movement within its Criminal Justice policies as quickly as in the next decade?

Participating in the democratic process is often taught to children as one of the most important responsibilities a citizen of the United States has. Yet it seems that in some parts of the country, as soon as an American steps foot into a jail cell, they are no longer considered a citizen. America prides itself on being a free, fair, and inclusive democracy, but is it too presumptuous to call ourselves this while millions of citizens are denied the right to vote because of a criminal justice system inherently biased towards the color of their skin?