New York, New York 3/17/2008 4:17:28 PM
American Prison Consultants - U.N. Calls For Felon Reinfranchisement
The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has called on the United States to restore voting rights automatically to people with felony convictions after completion of their criminal sentence.
The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has called on the United States to restore voting rights automatically to people with felony convictions after completion of their criminal sentence. The panel raised concern that current disenfranchisement policies have a disparate racial and ethnic impact and may be in violation of international law.
"Why shouldn't felons get to vote", said Larry Levine, former federal inmate and owner of prison consulting firm American Prison Consultants "It's taxation without representation, and it's not like we don't pay taxes, and when you have millions of citizens who don't get to choose their government, that is a serious problem for democracy," said Levine.
The practice of denying voting rights to people with felony convictions in the U.S. disenfranchises 5.3 million citizens, says the Washington, D.C.-based Sentencing Project. Eleven states restrict voting by people even after they have completed their sentence, including prison, probation, and parole, and many are barred for life. About 1.5 million people are disenfranchised post-sentence. The Sentencing Project says that 1 in 50 African-American women cannot vote, an increase of nearly 14 percent since 2000. This rate of disenfranchisement is nearly four times the rate for non-African-American women. Overall, an estimated 792,200 women are ineligible to vote as a result of U.S. felony disenfranchisement laws. Under current incarceration rates, three in ten of the next generation of black men can expect to be disenfranchised at some point.
In November 2004, the Supreme Court declined to review Locke v. Farrakhan, letting stand a ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that allowed felons to challenge Washington state's felon disenfranchisement law as a violation of the Voting Rights Act. At the same time, however, the Court also let stand a 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in Muntaqim v. Coombe, which held that the Voting Rights Act did not apply to New York's law.
