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  • Living in Infamy: Felon Disfranchisement and the History of American Citizenship by Pippa Holloway
  • Paula C. Johnson
Living in Infamy: Felon Disfranchisement and the History of American Citizenship. By Pippa Holloway. Studies in Crime and Public Policy. ( New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii, 236. $38.95, ISBN 978-0-19-997608-9.)

Historian Pippa Holloway has written an impressive volume that speaks directly to our time. With the resurgence of regulations that create obstacles to [End Page 1001] voting and disparately impact people of color and poor communities, Holloway provides an incisive account of one of the primary bases for denying substantial numbers of citizens the right to vote. Living in Infamy: Felon Disfranchisement and the History of American Citizenship tells the story of restrictions on the voting rights of felons and former felons. The book is copiously researched, and it is rooted in narrative accounts and a historical, legal, and constitutional analysis of the role of infamy in citizenship and voting rights.

Holloway focuses on the post–Civil War South from 1866 to the early twentieth century. She explains how a racist ideology has historically undergirded felon disenfranchisement policies and laws that disproportionately affect African American voters, even when such restrictions ostensibly apply to the larger population of felons and former felons. She advances two major arguments. First, she argues that denying voting rights was contingent on the condition of infamy. Determining infamy was often used as a pretext to deny voting rights based on race and also was extended to poor white people. Infamy, Holloway explains, defined citizenship and determined which citizens were and were not worthy of the franchise. These predicates were established in order to maintain racial and class subordination.

Early Greek and Roman legal traditions deemed that certain criminal convictions resulted in "civil 'degradation'" (p. 5). The resultant loss of citizenship rights constituted a state of infamy. English common law had a detailed tradition under which infamy meant the loss of public standing and disqualification from civic participation, including court testimony, jury service, officeholding, and the right to vote. This concept was embraced with particular fervor in the southern United States. Hence, Holloway's second key argument focuses on the generalization of infamy, to disenfranchise anyone who has been incarcerated, regardless of race. Holloway's analysis demonstrates that southern and northern states held different views on citizenship, criminality, and the retributive and rehabilitative purposes of incarceration. These differences gave way, however, as states outside the South endorsed more punitive objectives and the widespread disenfranchisement of convicts.

After the Civil War, the ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments brought an end to slavery. Formerly enslaved African Americans were finally to be accorded equal status and rights as U.S. citizens. Yet Holloway meticulously demonstrates that analytical interplay between the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments was used to maintain a racial caste system. Both of these amendments conferred citizenship and suffrage rights to former slaves but included exceptions for criminal involvement and participation in rebellion. Holloway argues that the amendments were targeted at former members of the Confederacy. However, southern states refused to relinquish notions of white supremacy and simply transformed black citizens into criminals by using criminal codes that designated them as such and elevated misdemeanors to felonies. Thereby, the notion of black people as inherently infamous and unworthy of the vote was perpetuated in social, legal, constitutional, and judicial treatments.

Holloway's book is an important contribution on a cornerstone of democratic participation—the right to vote. She has shown how the historical foundations of infamy set the stage for felon disenfranchisement and its [End Page 1002] disproportionate racial effects in the present day. Further, she has shown how socioeconomic class also was an impetus to deny the vote to poorer white people. Her book is essential reading.

Paula C. Johnson
Syracuse University College of Law
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