No, duly imprisoned American criminals should not be allowed to vote. Neither should most newly released ones.
My colleague Erin Dunne provides eloquent commentary, and Sen. Bernie Sanders provides inanities, to the contrary. For most people, though, it seems entirely common sense to oppose letting people vote from prison. And their common sense is correct. Lawbreakers, especially violent ones, have transgressed against civil society writ large. They may not forfeit all human rights in doing so, but voting is a forfeitable civic privilege in the same way freedom of movement, gun rights, and freedom of association are denied in prison.
If a polity of free citizens, acting through legitimate republican procedures, can determine that one punishment for lawbreaking is to sleep in iron-barred cells, why can’t they determine that another punishment is to temporarily forfeit the franchise? By their own, intentional actions, criminals make themselves wards of the state and a burden on society. Why should they have the same privilege of choosing the leaders of the wage-earning, taxpaying, law-abiding citizens against whom they have transgressed? Why should they be allowed to cancel out the votes of their victims?
[Related: Pete Buttigieg breaks with Bernie Sanders on allowing felons to vote from prison]
This logic extends beyond the walls of prison. Plenty of lesser offenders are punished not by imprisonment but by other means such as community service, probation, and the like. It is not unreasonable for citizens, through representative means, to decide that such lawbreakers still should lose the vote in order to recognize the seriousness of their transgressions against civil society itself. As in “just because you avoided prison doesn’t mean you’re a full citizen again yet. Prove yourself. Earn it.”
None of this is to deny that some states have overly bureaucratic means of eventual vote-restoration for former prisoners. One goal of rehabilitation should be to help ex-inmates become fully functioning members of society again. States dissuade good citizenship by withholding voting rights too long or making their restoration too unwieldy a process.
But the corollary to that is also reasonable: If former inmates are led to believe that full voting rights is a privilege to be earned, rather than just awarded to them when they walk away from prison walls, they are more likely to cherish it, to exercise it responsibly — and not to forfeit it again through renewed misbehavior.
Furthermore, it’s a lot less impressive to avoid criminality again when one is under supervised probation than when one is entirely free, without state officials breathing down one’s back or checking urine samples. If full citizenship is to hold value in itself, it shouldn’t be tied to mere lack of oversight or physical restraint.
For all those reasons, the best system for re-enfranchisement would, with the exception of some violent crimes, restore voting privileges automatically after a year of complete freedom without supervision or recidivism.
In other words, prove for one year as a free man or woman that this time you will abide by what one poet called “the laws ourselves have made,” and you’ll be fully a citizen again, needing only to register to vote like any other citizen in these United States.
Re-earned citizenship can be a glorious thing. Rehabilitated convicts can be wonderful citizens. And states should do far more than many of them now do to support post-confinement rehabilitation, so that more ex-cons earn that reward of voting, along with jobs, dignity, and re-earned respect.
