Mississippi: Deprivation of Criminals’ Rights is a Kafka-Worthy Racist Labyrinth | voting rights in the United States

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Hello and have a good Thursday,

For the past several years, I’ve wanted to write about how Mississippi denies the right to vote some felony convictions. Every state in the country has slightly different disenfranchisement laws for criminals, but Mississippi’s is particularly harsh.

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More than 235,000 people in the state cannot vote because of a felony conviction, according to an estimate from the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit criminal justice organization. That’s over 10% of the voting age population, and nearly 16% of black people of voting age cannot vote because of a felony conviction.

Mississippi has the highest criminal deprivation rate in the country, as states across the country recently relaxed those laws, many of which are rooted in the explicit racism of the Jim Crow era. Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Iowa, Virginia, Louisiana and New York have all taken steps to allow those convicted of crimes to vote again. Mississippi law has remained intact and unchanged.

Over the past several months, I have spoken with Roy Harness and Dennis Hopkins, two men from Mississippi who are permanently barred from voting in Mississippi due to crimes they committed decades ago. Last weekend, we published an article explaining how the two are feeling the consequences of a racist law that continues to prevent thousands of people from voting today.

In 1890, delegates to the state’s constitutional convention chose a handful of crimes that would cause someone to lose their franchise forever. At first glance, this list seems random – corruption, burglary, theft, arson, perjury, forgery, embezzlement, and bigamy – were all included. Murder and rape were not.

But a few years later, the Mississippi Supreme Court explained that delegates had deliberately chosen crimes they believed blacks were more likely to commit. It was part of a larger plan to stop black people from voting after the 15th Amendment was passed, which says no citizen can be denied the right to vote on the basis of their race.

Today there is a process for those convicted of crimes to regain their right to vote, but it is almost impossible to navigate. Someone with a disqualifying crime must first convince a lawmaker to introduce an individualized bill on their behalf to reclaim the right to vote. Both houses of the Mississippi legislature must approve it by a two-thirds majority, and then the governor must approve it.

There is no state data on how many people apply and are approved each year. But Mississippi criminal justice researcher Blake Feldman began tracking these bills in 2018. By retrieving data from the Mississippi Legislature’s website, he gathered all of the suffrage bills that were tabled. since 1997. And what he found was astounding.

Since 1997, only 185 people have been able to successfully use the process to reclaim their voting rights, according to his data. Some years no one has taken the plunge. On average, only seven people recover their voting rights per year. “It’s disturbing,” Feldman told me.

When he started reviewing the bills, Feldman told me he was surprised how many were presented on behalf of people who had not committed any of the specific disqualifying crimes.

Hannah Williams, research and policy analyst at MS Votes, which works to expand access to voting, told me there was widespread confusion over how the law works. His organization helps people enter their data.

“There’s really no way to guarantee anything because the process doesn’t really make sense. There is no information. You can’t go to a website. And to be honest, you can’t even call the capital to get information because they don’t really know what the process is, ”she said.

Harness and Hopkins are both the main plaintiffs in two federal lawsuits challenging Mississippi law. Both told me they didn’t even know there was a process for them to get their voting rights back.

“It hurts me. I served my country, my nation … I graduated and [I] still can’t vote no matter what you do to prove yourself, ”Harness told me.

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