It’s Time for Black Americans Behind Bars to Roar!
D.C. has given us the right to vote; now we need to use that power to demand change
By Rob Barton with Pam Bailey
The United States’ positioning of itself as a role model of democracy that countries around the world should emulate took a hit this month when the International Institute for Democratic Electoral Assistance added us to its list of “backsliding democracies,” citing vote suppression, runaway political polarization and factional efforts to undermine the 2020 election. Echoing these concerns, Fernand de Varennes, U.N. special rapporteur on minority issues, told an international audience, “[The United States] has become almost a tyranny of the majority, where minorities’ right to vote is being denied in many parts of the country. This is not consistent with the fundamental values of democracy and certainly it is not consistent with the United States’ international human rights obligations.”
This country has earned that criticism: According to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school, 19 states passed 33 new laws this year that restrict voting in myriad ways. For the more than 2 million Americans locked behind bars, the right to vote has long been denied. And the elites who control the system have doubled down on that disenfranchisement via “prison gerrymandering.” Through this little-known practice, incarcerated individuals — who are disproportionately black or brown but often are imprisoned in rural, predominantly white census tracts — are counted as “residents” in the states where they are imprisoned. You can guess the result — a shift in political power from communities of color to the conservative enclaves that also profit off the jobs and other revenues prisons provide.
Briana Remster, associate professor with Villanova University’s Department of Sociology and Criminology, compares prison gerrymandering to the deal with the devil struck by the framers of the U.S. Constitution: Enslaved black people were counted as just three-fifths of a person for the purposes of determining the number of congressional seats allocated to Southern states. “Black and Brown bodies are still being used to this day in most places around the U.S. to advantage White voters and White political power,” she writes.
Fortunately, my home — the District of Colombia — is bucking this trend toward disenfranchisement. In 2020, the D.C. Council passed legislation that restores voting rights to people convicted of a felony, even those still behind bars. Before then, just Maine and Vermont — the country’s whitest states — allowed citizens to vote while incarcerated. Now, the challenge is to motivate the 2,684 District residents currently in federal custody (D.C. does not have its own prison) to exercise that right. It will be a struggle, since indifference and distrust are high in this community. I know because I shared those sentiments until recently.
Voting never seemed relevant in Black, low-income D.C.
I grew up in southeast D.C., where it seemed to the adults around me that politicians only visited when it was election time and they needed our votes. Once the election was over, they were gone, but the dilapidated schools and potholed streets never changed. The feeling was, what use is voting? As I got older and starting learning about government and politics through school and — later, in prison — my own reading, that belief only deepened. Books like Howard Zinn’s The People’s History of the United States led me to the conclusion that when it came to my people, it really didn’t matter what party is in power.
It wasn’t until I returned to the D.C. Jail a couple of years ago and stayed long enough to participate in Georgetown University’s Prison Scholar Program that I started to change my mind. Outside speakers came in and I mixed with criminal-justice students who wanted to use their education to change the world. I was treated like my voice mattered and I learned how politics works and how to advocate for myself and others. I saw that complaining and crying from the sidelines would never bring about change, but speaking up, at least at the local level, could. As Frederick Douglass said in 1857, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress…Power concedes nothing without a demand.”
This has led me to start the a voting project to galvanize my brothers and sisters in the federal Bureau of Prisons, D.C.’s Department of Corrections, and their family members and friends who support us to vote and create a bloc that demands to be heard. D.C. is not a state yet — which is among the most egregious examples of blatant voter disenfranchisement — and thus cannot shape the make-up of congress. And we’re too small to affect the presidential race. (Consider though: 45% of Americans have an immediate family member who was incarcerated at one time! Now, if we could coalesce them into an active voting bloc, that adds up to influence.)
We have voices and we need to raise them
But we can have a real impact on local policies in a District that already has shown recent commitment to criminal-legal reform. For example, D.C. passed a second-look act, allowing anyone arrested before the age of 25 and has been incarcerated for at least 15 years to petition for release. But there is a lot more to be done. The council is now considering extending that right to people first arrested at all ages, as well as banning mandatory-minimum sentences. We expect opposition by the mayor, prosecutors, the police and others, and we have to help push through those reforms. In addition, many of the approximately 500 individuals currently eligible for second-look release will need immediate housing. If no relatives can take them in, or the neighborhood/family environment is not conducive to a healthy re-entry, they need no-cost shelter from day one. D.C. needs to start preparing for this juggernaut now. And we are the ones who must speak up and keep it up. Now we have the vehicle to do it.
The other challenge is the federal Bureau of Prisons, which is not known for caring all that much about our rights. One of the guys from D.C. told me that he registered last year when he was in a Colorado penitentiary and was eager to vote, only to be told by the so-called reentry coordinator that he wouldn’t submit the ballot. The League of Women Voters (which is helping answer questions through a telephone hotline and other outreach activities) tells us that kind of passive obstructionism will hopefully not be as much of a problem next year, since Biden has supported the D.C. law with a presidential decree. But we must be vigilant. (In the future, what is really needed are polling kiosks in every prison law library that are accessible even during lockdowns.)
Meanwhile, More Than Our Crimes is stepping up to the plate. We have a growing network of incarcerated D.C. residents connected via our outside collaborators and the prison email system, we’re educating each other on the issues, we’ll be helping everyone figure out how to register and vote, and we’ll be speaking up through op-eds, petitions, etc.
To borrow from the lyrics of Helen Reddy:
[We are behind bars,] but we can roar
In numbers too big to ignore
And we know too much to go back an’ pretend
’Cause we’ve heard it all before
And have been down there on the floor
No one’s ever gonna keep us down again.
