By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, May 01, 2019
Bernie Sanders, the Brooklyn socialist who represents
Vermont in the Senate, has called for extending voting rights to prisoners
currently incarcerated — all of them, he says, meaning: Terry Nichols, Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev, Nidal Hasan, sundry Aryan Brotherhood bosses, a blanket immunity that
presumably would have covered the late Charles Manson before he went off to his
eternal reward.
As a matter of political calculation, the Democrats
probably are less interested in supermax-cloistered terrorists than in African
Americans, who were more than twice as likely to vote Democrat as white voters
in 2018 (90 percent vs. 44 percent) and who are about five times as likely to
be incarcerated at some point in their lives. One study puts the number of
black men convicted of a felony at 33 percent, a genuinely shocking figure, and
there is evidence that African Americans also are more likely to be wrongly convicted.
Startling as these figures are, it is not obvious why the
restoration of convicted felons’ voting rights is a good idea at all, much less
something that should be at the top of the agenda. We exclude felons from
voting for much the same reason that we generally exclude them from practicing
law: We do not trust them with that power because of the contempt for the law
they have demonstrated.
When challenged on felon voting, Democrats ask
rhetorically: “Why should these men and women continue to be punished after
they have served their time?” It is an unserious question asked by unserious
people. If we were serious about completely restoring the civil and social
status of felons after release, then we would, among other things, allow them
to buy and keep guns, to serve in security-sensitive positions, to be protected
from exclusion in professional licensure and discrimination in hiring, etc.
None of that is talked about very much — the discussion mostly begins and ends
at voting rights. Cynical, but predictable.
But we should be talking about some of those other
things.
We have a general social interest in maximizing the
rehabilitation of criminals, and if the humane reasons for doing so are not
sufficiently persuasive, consider the costs involved, both direct costs for
police and penal work, and indirect economic costs.
Sometimes, those costs are bitterly comical: In 2017, Los
Angeles County spent $3.9 million to collect $3.4 million in “administrative
fees” — these are distinct from fines and restitution — from released felons,
who often leave prison deep in debt for administrative fees ranging from court
costs to rent on ankle monitors, which can be shockingly expensive. Those being
released are presented with overwhelming and inscrutable bills. Government is a
hungry beast, and many states dedicate those funds to specific programs. For
example, Virginia applies a fixed formula to divide felons’ fees between the
general fund, a special forensic-science fund, a fund for court reporters,
courthouse maintenance, training programs, something called the Intensified
Drug Enforcement Jurisdiction Fund, and a fund controlled by the commonwealth’s
attorney.
This presents an obvious opportunity for reform, and a
relatively easy one. As Courtney E. Martin reports in the New York Times, several California counties — San Francisco,
Alameda, and Contra Costa, with Los Angeles expected to follow — have stopped
assessing such fees and have forgiven some debts associated with them. Like Los
Angeles County, San Francisco has found it difficult to actually collect these
fees: About 17 percent of what is assessed is actually paid. And what is paid
often is being paid by the wives, girlfriends, and family of felons, who find
it difficult to get decent work.
But even the relatively small collections amount to
millions of dollars that somebody somewhere in some bureaucracy is counting on
— which means that there will be resistance.
We hear a lot of talk about “violent felons” as distinct
from nonviolent ones, because there are a lot of things, some of them
ridiculous, that can make one a felon. For example, under 18 USC § 228, the
failure to make court-ordered child-support payments can be a federal felony
offense, if the payments are more than two years past due or amount to more
than $10,000. People who are ordered to make child-support payments should make
them, but those who fail to are not really in the same class of people as Terry
Nichols or Nidal Hasan, or a murderer of the more common type. It may be that
we need a third general classification of criminal offense, something that
denotes a crime more serious than a misdemeanor (which might be anything from
reckless driving to assault) but short of the sort of thing we really do want
to see met with a lifelong social disability.
There are many convicted criminals who can be
rehabilitated, and we should want to see them rehabilitated, which is almost
impossible to achieve if they are economically handicapped for the rest of
their postcarceral lives. The criminal-justice system should, to the extent
that we can arrange it, forgo creating criminal incentives of its own, for
instance by piling on financial burdens even as it forecloses most avenues for
meeting them.
Here is a prediction: You’re going to hear a lot more
from Democrats in 2020 about forgiving student-loan debt for upwardly mobile
young people, who vote in substantial numbers and who make considerable
political contributions. When it comes to felons, you’ll hear about very little
other than getting them on the voting rolls.
But there is more to these people than their votes, and
more to human flourishing than maximizing the headcount of Mayor Catherine
Pugh’s political party.
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