Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (review)

The criminal justice system has long been known to engage in biased practices based on race, thus reframing the literal meaning of "justice" into one that mocks what justice is purported to be: the ideal of fairness and impartiality. Recurrently, such biases that transpire are attributed to bigoted individuals working within this system and not imputed to a biased system. The era of explicitly race-based policies that impair people of color has passed. However, based on comparisons to the racial composition of the general population in the United States, the criminal justice system remains overrepresented with persons of color throughout every stage of the crime-processing system. A rejoinder offered by some commentators on the "crime problem" is often one-dimensional, by reasoning that people of color simply commit more crime; therefore, it is quite obvious why people of color are clients of the criminal justice system at greater rates than whites. But such a view fails to consider the nuances of race relations in the United States and the country's history since colonization by Europeans. The perpetuation of this observation calls for intellectuals, whether sociologists, criminologists or others, to be conscientious in their work on policy-oriented concerns within the criminal justice system – even more so during this post-Civil Rights era of so-called race-neutral policies and bureaucracy. Indeed, criminal justice policies have the ability to negatively affect all individuals regardless of race. However, contemporary examinations of many of these policies frequently find that they disproportionately affect people of color.

Though the fields of sociology and criminology often provide impetus for social and policy change, only a few works appear deferentially capable of crossing over from academia to the real-world of public sociology or public criminology. Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen's Locked Out is one of those works. Manza and Uggen methodically address the concerns regarding voting rights for felons and ex-felons in an accessible yet solidly erudite manner.

Manza and Uggen's use of quantitative research methods to investigate state-level histories of disenfranchisement laws, estimate the number of disenfranchised felons (5.3 million on the Nov. 2, 2004 election day), and determine political attitudes among felons, along with the use of the qualitative research method of semi-structured, in-depth interviews, provides a comprehensive view of how felon disenfranchisement has affected and continues to affect convicted offenders. Their state-level statistical analysis resulted in glaring variations based on race, where African Americans in particular were found to have been restricted in their ability to vote. The exploration into the political ideology of felons yielded speculative findings indicating that commission of property and violent offenses, arrests and incarceration are less likely to occur among individuals who vote, but factors other than criminal history, such as race, gender and level of education, which can affect who commits crimes and is processed through the criminal justice system, are also important in voting behaviors. While utilizing longitudinal data on youth and younger adults in Minnesota (the Youth Development Study) to discover these variations may not be completely generalizable because of the peculiarities of the political involvement and climate, educational attainment and racial make-up of the area, the data still impart beneficial information. Manza and Uggen's continued tracking of the YDS cohort in future years would likely prove invaluable to further determine the relationship between voting and continued criminal activity among felons.

The suggestions originating from the YDS statistical analysis better enabled the authors to formulate their qualitative investigation of the attitudes among convicted felons on the subject of political participation. The deficiency of the in-depth interviews with prisoners, parolees and probationers lies in the sample selection method. Soliciting for research participants with a call that advertised the study as being "about voting and politics" may have assembled individuals who were more devoted to the concept, impact and importance of voting and...