The de facto leader of the Democratic Party is out with some fresh, new wisdom today.
To avoid looking completely + utterly out of touch w/ the reality our prison system:
Instead of asking, “Should the Boston Bomber have the right to vote?”
Try, “Should a nonviolent person stopped w/ a dime bag LOSE the right to vote?”
Bc that question reflects WAY more people.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) April 25, 2019
I know this will come as a shock, but she is wrong.
There’s no question that our criminal justice system is broken. Convicted sexual assaulters like Brock Turner and Alec Cook receive six-month and three-year sentences, respectively, while the since-pardoned Alice Marie Johnson was sentenced to life in prison for a first-time, nonviolent drug offense. President Trump rightly attempted to rectify the situation with the First Step Act, and reports indicate that the administration, seeing criminal justice reform as a winning issue, will continue to make progress.
But AOC seems unaware that violent offenders comprise a majority of the state prison population and a plurality within local jails. It is only in federal prisons, which account for a tiny fraction of the nation’s prison population, that nonviolent drug offenders outnumber violent offenders.
The overwhelming majority of the country’s prison population resides in state prisons, and only 3.45% of those prisoners are incarcerated for drug possession. Drug offenders comprise a quarter of the population in local jails, which house a little more than a quarter of the country’s overall prison population. Just 5% of our youth prison population is composed of drug offenders. But around 4 out of 10 federal prisoners are drug offenders.
So AOC lies, misleads, or shows her ignorance when she frames the prison population as if nonviolent drug offenders were clearly representative of the average prisoner. If you look outside the federal prison system to the much larger prison population in the states, the average prisoner looks like a violent felon. Thus, the question of whether convicted, violent felons deserve to vote before they finished paying their debt to society still matters.
