While Kim Kardashian West reinvigorated the debate surrounding criminal justice reform outside of CNN or Washington, D.C. think tanks, the issue at hand is very prominent and detrimental to the democracy of the United States especially mass incarceration. The devastating effects of mass incarceration disportionately impacts African American and Hispanic families, populations that tend to vote Democrat, especially in the case of African American voters. In the United States prisoners are a vital component of the elections even though they virtually have no say. Their bodies and personhood are simultaneously stripped from them and weaponized against them.
Out of all the developed countries, the United States has the highest prison population at a staggering 2.3 million. Of this prison population, in 2017, 33% were African-American and 23% were Hispanic according to the Pew Research Center. African Americans and Hispanics account for just 28% of the US population. When such a large proportion of a population is silenced, how can the system that comes out of this repression reflect the will of the people?
In 2016, US politics became more polarized than it had ever been, resulting in the election of a President who won according to the electoral college, but not according to the popular vote. Only 60% of the voting population participated in this election. Of this 60%, only 6% of black people reported voting for President Trump while 54% of white voters did, and 28% of Hispanic voters. Moreover, this election resulted in Republicans gaining control of the House, the Senate and the presidency.
A democratic political system with regularly held, competitive elections does not equate to a government elected for the people by the people when most of the time “electoral decisions are not necessarily the will of the people, they are the will of certain people”[1]. Since the 1970s, policies like mandatory minimum sentences and 100 to 1 gaps in sentencing ratios for drug offenses have contributed to mass incarceration, the legacy of which has disproportionately affected minorities.
While the US meets the criteria of being a democracy on paper by having free and fair elections and allowing the majority of the population to be eligible to vote, in practice the institutions set up to safeguard democratic rule actually hinders it [2]. Elections may not be decided by a small subsect of the bourgeois but they still explicitly exclude and undermine already disadvantaged populations.
Voter suppression has been a hot topic since the 2018 midterm elections with one of the most famous and controversial races happening in Georgia when Stacey Abrams ran against Brian Kemp for the governorship. Abrams believes that Kemp, in his role as Georgia’s secretary of state, purged more than 85,000 voters three months prior to the election. In 2017, 668,000 voters were purged. Of these, only 200,000 were found to be valid removals after further investigation. Kemp claimed to have been removing the voters who had supposedly moved or passed away. However, especially when it comes to populations that are low income and minority groups -which often intersect -these criteria have a disproportionate impact. Individuals within these populations may not always have a permanent or stable address and they are less likely to vote in every election, but that does not give anyone, Secretary or not, the right to purge their vote without proper investigation and notice.
US elections may happen regularly and on the day of, they may seem free and fair, but the days leading up to them make all the difference because “only amateurs steal elections on election day” [3]. The democratic political system in the United States was initially made to benefit a small group of rich, white, landowning men. Over time, the voting population was expanded. However, this expansion did not necessarily make it possible for every registered voter to engage with politics. While the US claims itself to be the leader of the free world, it has hints of stealth authoritarianism, especially in this presidential administration, through their voter registration laws and electoral barriers to entry [4].
Despite not being able to vote during and after serving their sentence, felons are still counted as residents in the areas in which they are imprisoned instead of the communities where they are from. This oversight results in the increase of electoral power of mainly rural areas since they house the majority of prisons. As of 2016, 6.1 million incarcerated and formerly incarcerated Americans were legally denied the right to vote.
Moreover, for individuals who are or have been incarcerated for non-felony offenses, they are left feeling politically disenfranchised. While they are legally allowed to vote, they are less motivated to engage with a system that often leaves them feeling like social pariahs. Previously incarcerated individuals have a long list of requirements to meet to vote and a general lack of information regarding civil political engagement post incarceration and even during their sentences. These more covert barriers to entry for this population reflect ways in which the United States uses mass incarceration as another vehicle to suppress and weaponize voting populations.
Bachrach and Baratz claim that competition for power does not happen in a completely neutral playing field or institution. There are methods by which privileged groups consolidate and maintain their power and the United States is not free from these tactics [4]. Since its founding, one of the US failings as a country is the fundamentally racist and discriminatory origins of its institutions. Democracies thrive with low income inequality and an active civil society. When there are large sections of the population being left out of the political process and being systematically disenfranchised socioeconomically and politically outside of the supposedly “free and fair” elections, that is a cause for concern and a threat to the fairness of the nation’s political institutions.
[1] Schumpeter, Joseph. (1943). Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper & Brothers. [2] Acemoglu, Daron & Robinson, James. 2006. Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 2. [3] Bermeo, Nancy. 2016. “On Democratic Backsliding.” Journal of Democracy 27(1): pp. 5-19. [4] Varol, Ozan. (2015). Stealth Authoritarianism. Iowa Law Review 100(4).
This post provides poignant insight into the how stealth authoritarianism festers in American democracy through socioeconomically and racially stratified curation of its civic membership. It’s intellectually compelling and personally disconcerting to explore how some of America’s formal laws and institutions, such as federal imprisonment, undercut democratic norms guaranteed in name by the Constitution, particularly citizens’ right to vote. This study successfully encapsulates and builds upon Robert Lieberman’s assertion that “challenges to the citizenship and participatory rights of minority groups amount to a challenge to democracy itself.” The historical precedent for ascriptive inequality suggests that the trend of voter suppression is a continuation of exclusionary norms rather than a contemporary product of Trumpism or Tea Party conservatism. Selective civic membership’s institutionalization throughout American political history may be an interesting continuation of this piece into the roots of current threats to America’s democratic integrity.
I think looking at mass incarceration as a component of democratic backsliding in the US is an interesting angle that forces us take a look at how our institutions are functioning and impacting the citizens of our country. The prison industrial complex was created as a way to oppress and subdue minorities, and it continues to function this way today. It is important that as citizens we reflect on the efficacy of our democratic institutions such as our criminal justice system, and recognize how these institutions harm specific groups and strip them of their rights, and analyze why these institutions have continued to thrive in modern society today. Addressing the issue of mass incarceration and racial disparities in our criminal justice system is an important step in democratizing our institutions and making them work for all citizens.
Page and Gilens’ elite theory helps to provide an explanation for this phenomenon of mass incarceration. Keeping groups of voters who would vote against the interests of the elites’ disenfranchised helps keep the elites, well, elite, while discouraging participation in the democratic process.
In Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, chapter 3 (“The Color of Justice”) talks extensively about the highly racialized War on Drugs. Though drug usage is about the same across all racial groups, black and Latino people are arrested disproportionately for drugs. The arrests themselves can be humiliating and violating, further inducing psychological damage onto the person being arrested. The inherent disgust law enforcement seems to hold for black and brown people creates a sort of racial caste system in America, and the high rates of arrest ensure that those at the bottom can stay at the bottom. When those arrested have served their time, they are “freed” from jail, but life after incarceration is anything but free. Not only are they unable to vote, but it is significantly harder to get a job, you are branded as a criminal forever in society, and many incarcerated people fall into poverty or go back to jail (these are, more often than not, comorbid). In a way, the prison-industrial complex is “legal slavery.”
The power of the media cannot be discounted either, as news stories on crime also perpetuate the stereotype of black and brown people as irredeemable drug peddlers looking to corrupt innocent white children. These stereotypes reach as far back as right after Emancipation. Birth of a Nation, one of the most popular films of that time period, depict the emancipated black man as a rapist looking to steal away white women. The Ku Klux Klan is depicted as heroic, and the film is even credited with bringing a resurgence to the Klan’s membership and activity. The ritual of cross-burning, for instance, was not an actual Klan practice until the film depicted it. The director thought it would be a striking image to film, and the Klan seemed to agree, as they adopted the practice shortly after. When it became unacceptable to explicitly speak about black people negatively, politicians started using coded language that would be associated with black people. Welfare, for example, was positively seen in the wake of the New Deal. At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, though, welfare became a highly racialized issue and was seen as something only poor black people would receive rather than something all poor people, including poor white people, would receive. White voters would vote against their own interests if it meant that black people would not get a single cent from the taxes they, the hardworking whites, paid. And with that, elite interests were preserved as well with tax cuts and the continued racial wealth gap.
Elites do not keep racial minorities subjugated just so they have a group that would be against them disenfranchised, however. More prisoners mean more prison labor, which means more profits for the corporations that use prison labor. In a study published in Contemporary Justice Review entitled “Hidden corporate profits in the U.S. prison system: the unorthodox policy-making of the American Legislative Exchange Council,” ALEC sought to expand the prison-industrial complex in three ways: “(1) promoting greater use of private prisons, goods, and services, (2) promoting greater use of prison labor, and (3) increasing the size of the prison population” (Cooper et. al., 2016, pp. 1). Much of laws that enable the high usage of prison labor are a result of ALEC, a nonprofit organization with membership from corporations and conservative politicians that seeks to pass conservative legislation. This legislation includes bills that increase mandatory sentencing, create new crimes, and create harsher punishments for existing crimes that disproportionately affect people of color. When a company states that their products are “American made,” they may just mean that they are using equally abused and exploited prison laborers.
The prison-industrial complex as “legal slavery” is an important topic to discuss in relation to democratic erosion. America’s high rates of incarceration are not accidental, and a multitude of factors collide to create this insidious system built on racist cornerstones. While slavery is technically illegal, it is not coincidental that the 13th Amendment makes an exception in the case of slavery as punishment for a crime. This loophole simply required elites to come up with creative ways to artificially increase crime to increase the prison population to increase the amount of “legal” slave labor at their disposal and to decrease political opposition to the policies they want to pass.