Turnout and Amendment Four: Mobilizing Eligible Voters Close to Formerly Incarcerated Floridians

Recent scholarship shows that eligible voters in neighborhoods home to many arrested and incarcerated individuals vote at lower rates than those in less-affected neighborhoods. Little work, however, has investigated how this turnout gap might be counteracted. This paper uses Amendment Four, a 2018 Florida ballot initiative that promised to re-enfranchise most individuals whose voting rights had been revoked due to a felony conviction to investigate whether this turnout disparity can be narrowed by a ballot initiative of particular significance to communities most affected by incarceration. Using prison release records, I identify the neighborhoods and households where formerly incarcerated individuals live and assess the voting history of their neighbors and housemates. I find no evidence that Amendment Four increased these voters’ turnout in 2018 relative to other voters. While ending felony disenfranchisement is necessary, closing the turnout gap resulting from histories of policing and incarceration will require greater investment and engagement.

Neighborhoods and Felony Disenfranchisement: The Case of New York City

Over the past two decades, scholars have sought to estimate the direct and indirect effects of felony disenfranchisement on political representation. This literature, however, has often overlooked both the geographic concentration of communities impacted by overincarceration and the low propensity to vote exhibited by individuals convicted of felony crimes. In this article, I redefine “lost voters” as disenfranchised individuals with a history of participating in elections. I map these individuals to their preincarceration addresses and use multiple approaches to explore whether their home neighborhoods turned out at lower rates than other neighborhoods in the 2017 New York City (NYC) mayoral election. I find that neighborhoods that were home to lost voters turned out at substantially lower rates than similar neighborhoods, and that Black neighborhoods are particularly impacted by the spillover effects of disenfranchisement. These indirect effects of the incarceration of would-be voters may have serious implications for the representation of impacted neighborhoods.

A Prison Education Counternarrative: “Mock Citizenship” in a Women’s Prison

In this article, we develop a perspective on the purposes and possibilities of education in prison through the stories of the first author, a prison educator and critical pedagogue. In the context of today’s prisons, we complicate universalist notions of citizenship by weaving theories of citizenship into the story of education. We share the daily concerns of a prison educator and explore the transformative possibilities that women convict students try on. We question how to shape educational practices in prison and contemplate the construction of a new “mock citizenship” informed by the realities of felony disenfranchisement. Our hope is to bring to the conversation something that has been lacking when discussions of incarceration occur: insight into the ways incarcerated students perform the role of citizen and how the purpose of prison education must extend beyond job readiness toward the creation of full citizens able to participate in the democratic process.

“They Are All She Had”

The chapter offers a unique exploration of the struggle for women’s suffrage by analyzing how formerly incarcerated women responded to the concept of infamy, the legal category of the loss of citizenship rights. The chapter highlights the tension between the South’s disenfranchisement practices and the concurrent demands of the suffrage movement by analyzing petitions to regain citizenship rights for female felons. These petitions come from a variety of states, including one from Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokolani alongside many other unrecognized women. Whereas most discussions of felony disenfranchisement have focused on African American men, this chapter uncovers a previously unwritten history that connects the struggle for suffrage with the struggle for voting rights among formerly incarcerated women. Rather than relegate these women as politically voiceless and nonhistorical actors, however, the essay instead recognizes convicted women as political actors willing to fight for their full citizenship rights as individuals inspired by the suffrage movement but without the organizational movement behind their individual efforts.