There are two interesting and disturbing points to consider in
regards to the disenfranchisement of prisoners:
1) They are counted as voters thus skewing congressional
districts, and as the first article linked below illustrates,
probable democratic voters are expanding republican
congressional districts.
2) The racist background of disenfranchisement.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0517/p09s02-coop.html
The prison effect on political landscape
Christian Science Monitor
[quote]DURHAM, N.C. – The US prison boom of the past 30 years
- which has nearly doubled the number of state prisons to more
than 1,000 and increased the nation's prison population from
218,000 to 1.3 million - has had widely recognized economic,
political, and social effects.
But one important political effect of the forced relocation of
millions of inmates has been largely overlooked: The dilution
of the urban black vote to the benefit of rural white
communities.
A new Urban Institute report shows that inmates tend to come
from regions that are demographically distinct from those in
which their prisons are located. And because the Census Bureau
counts prison inmates as residents of the legislative
districts in which they're incarcerated, the relocation of
inmates - who are not allowed to vote in 48 states - skews
both the distribution of government funds and the
apportionment of legislative representation.
This is a particularly grievous injustice in an era in which
presidential and legislative races are won by razor-thin
margins.
The distortion in representation caused by enumeration of
prisoners tends to favor rural residents, whites, and
Republicans, at the expense of urban residents, blacks, and
Democrats.[/quote][/quote]
http://www.alternet.org/story/16180/
Echoes of Juneteenth Haunt Us Today
By Joseph 'Jazz' Hayden, AlterNet. Posted June 19, 2003.
[quote]Is it coincidence that the harshest disenfranchisement
laws are mostly in former slave states? Not in the slightest.
Like poll taxes and literacy tests, the ostensibly
race-neutral disenfranchisement laws were created to keep
blacks from voting. In 1896, for example, Mississippi
lawmakers ruled that only a narrow range of offenses --
bribery, burglary, theft, arson, perjury, forgery,
embezzlement, bigamy and "obtaining money or goods under
false pretenses" -- made you lose the vote. Why not
murder or rape? Because ex-slaves were far more likely to
commit petty property crimes than serious offenses.
Southern lawmakers were not shy about their intentions.
"This plan," said one delegate to the Virginia
convention of 1906, which established rules similar to
Mississippi, "will eliminate the darkey as a political
factor in this State in less than five years."
The laws worked. One Alabama historian found that by 1903, the
laws had excluded nearly 10 times as many blacks as whites
from voting.[/quote][/quote]