Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy5.4 million Americans--1 in every 40 voting age adults-- are denied the right to participate in democratic elections because of a past or current felony conviction. In several American states, 1 in 4 black men cannot vote due to a felony conviction. In a country that prides itself on universal suffrage, how did the United States come to deny a voice to such a large percentage of its citizenry? What are the consequences of large-scale disenfranchisement--both for election outcomes, and for public policy more generally? Locked Out exposes one of the most important, yet little known, threats to the health of American democracy today. It reveals the centrality of racial factors in the origins of these laws, and their impact on politics today. Marshalling the first real empirical evidence on the issue to make a case for reform, the authors' path-breaking analysis will inform all future policy and political debates on the laws governing the political rights of criminals. |
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Contents
| 3 | |
| 11 | |
| 41 | |
| 69 | |
| 95 | |
5 Political Attitudes Voting and Criminal Behavior | 113 |
Felons Speak Out with Angela Behrens | 137 |
7 The Impact of Disenfranchisement on Political Participation | 165 |
8 A Threat to Democracy? | 181 |
9 Public Opinion and Felon Disenfranchisement with Clem Brooks | 205 |
10 Unlocking the Vote | 221 |
Appendix | 235 |
Notes | 291 |
Index | 353 |
Other editions - View all
Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy Jeff Manza,Christopher Uggen Limited preview - 2008 |
Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy Jeff Manza,Christopher Uggen Limited preview - 2006 |
Locked Out:Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy: Felon ... Jeff Manza,Christopher Uggen No preview available - 2006 |
Common terms and phrases
2000 presidential election African American American political appendix table arrest attitudes ballot changes chapter chisement citizens citizenship Civil Death civil rights clemency counterfactual Court criminal justice system criminal offenders Criminology democracy Democratic Department of Justice disen disenfran disenfranchised felons disenfranchised population drug electoral eligible enfranchisement estimate ex-felons example felon disenfranchisement laws felon population felon voting felons and ex-felons felony conviction Fifteenth Amendment Florida former felons Fourteenth Amendment franchise Government Printing Office important incarceration rates individuals inmates jail Jesse Ventura Keyssar Law Review ment Minnesota models nonwhite parole party percent political participation Princeton prison probation probationers Public Opinion punishment questions race racial threat recent recidivism reintegration Republican respondents restoring voting rights right to vote Sentencing Project Sidney Verba social Sociology state’s statistically suffrage survey tion turnout rates U.S. Department U.S. Senate U.S. Senate Elections United universal suffrage University Press voters Washington York
Popular passages
Page 15 - Mere legislative preferences or beliefs respecting matters of public convenience may well support regulation directed at other personal activities, but be insufficient to justify such as diminishes the exercise of rights so vital to the maintenance of democratic institutions.
Page 125 - Citizenship is a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community. All who possess the status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed.
Page 33 - A few years' experience satisfied the thoughtful men who had been the authors of the other two Amendments that, notwithstanding the restraints of those articles on the States, and the laws passed under the additional...
Page 42 - And further the court said, speaking of the negro race: By reason of its previous condition of servitude and dependence, this race had acquired or accentuated certain peculiarities of habit, of temperament, and of character, which clearly distinguished it, as a race, from that of the whites — a patient, docile people.
Page 324 - Norman H. Nie, Sidney Verba, and John R. Petrocik, The Changing American Voter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).
Page 42 - Restrained by the federal Constitution from discriminating against the negro race, the convention discriminated against its characteristics and the offenses to which its weaker members were prone.
Page 308 - The Voting Rights Act was designed by Congress to banish the blight of racial discrimination in voting, which had infected the electoral process in parts of our country for nearly a century.
Page 4 - No class of men can, without insulting their own nature, be content with any deprivation of their rights. We want it, again, as a means for educating our race. Men are so constituted that they derive their conviction of their own possibilities largely from the estimate formed of them by others. If nothing is expected of a people, that people will find it difficult to contradict that expectation.
Page 42 - Constitution, the convention swept the circle of expedients to obstruct the exercise of the franchise by the negro race.
Bibliographic information
| Title | Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy Studies in Crime and Public Policy |
| Authors | Jeff Manza, Christopher Uggen |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press, 2006 |
| ISBN | 0195348850, 9780195348859 |
| Length | 384 pages |
| Subjects | › › Law / Criminal Law / General Political Science / Public Policy / General Social Science / Criminology Social Science / Sociology / General |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |