Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (review)

Editor's Note:

Every once in a while, when a particularly important book is published, we choose to run multiple reviews. This issue features three reviews of Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen's Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy. – AJP

Inside or outside the academy, explanations that link specific causes to specific effects have an obvious appeal. This gene causes that disease; this individual caused that problem. From such explanations, it is simple to move from explanation to either remedy or moral responsibility. These moves are far more difficult when outcomes are produced by the conjuncture of distinct causes, each necessary but neither sufficient. This type of causation is characteristic of complex social systems, produced by layerings of institutions and divisions of power. Such fragmented and composite political systems easily produce results that no one intended or, at the least, explicitly advocated.

In Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy, Jeff Manza and Chris Uggen demonstrate that the exclusion of felons from the electorate is just such a phenomenon. When Americans reflect on voting rights, it may seem absolutely right that individuals found guilty of major violations of the law should be stripped of the right to select those who legislate and enforce the law. When those same Americans turn to debate criminal law, it may again seem entirely reasonable to expand the number of acts classified as felonies in order to "get tough on crime." Yet when these two processes intersect – as they must when "felon" is a key term in statutes determining the right to vote – the result is something that was never directly contemplated. According to Manza and Uggen's estimations, the total number of disenfranchised felons (which, according to state, may or may not include those in prison, on probation or with completed sentences) has increased from slightly more than 1 million in the mid-1970s to somewhere north of 5 million 30 years later. Rates are much higher in groups with higher rates of conviction. In 14 states, more than 10 percent of adult African Americans "have lost the right to vote by virtue of a felony conviction." In five states, more than 20 percent of this group is disenfranchised (pp. 78-79). Through powerful if perverse feedback processes, this limiting of the electorate is reinforced by the ongoing exclusion of those with the best understanding of the consequences of this limiting of the franchise: felons who have served their sentences but continue to be marked by this criminal classification. The results are at odds with public opinion surveys that suggest support for the disenfranchisement of current prisoners but "'draws the line' at the prison gates." (p. 218) So the puzzle is to understand how democratic processes have produced a result at odds with majority opinion.

Following the wisdom that sunshine is the best bleach, Manza and Uggen document and explain the origins, extent and consequences of the interaction between the organization of punishment and the institutions of electoral democracy. As might be expected from a book built out of scholarly articles, the narrative often breathlessly follows one specification of the models after another (most of the statistical apparatus is relegated to a series of important appendices). But the cumulative message is undeniably important. Manza and Uggen reconstruct a schematic history of suffrage restrictions: 20 states had felon disenfranchisement laws prior to the end of the Civil War (primarily in the North, the upper Midwest and the far West), and another 18 (including most of the Confederate states, some border states and much of the interior West) adopted laws between 1864 and 1899 (p. 50). Felon disenfranchisement, they argue, responded to the expansion of white manhood suffrage and then to the enfranchisement of African Americans following the Civil War. They estimate the make-up of the current population of disenfranchised felons, concluding that almost 40 percent are "ex-felons" who have completed their sentences as opposed to current jail inmates, prisoners, probationers and parolees (p. 77). The dramatic growth...