I’ll be traveling to Chicago this week for the American Bar Association’s annual meeting, where I’ve been invited to talk about voting law issues and the upcoming elections in 2016. I plan to make three points.
First, lawmakers should resist demands that felons be automatically re-enfranchised on the day they walk out of prison (currently, only two states — Maine and Vermont — allow prison inmates to vote). If you aren’t willing to follow the law yourself, then you can’t demand a role in making the law for everyone else, which is what you do when you vote. Or, to look at it another way, we don’t let everyone vote: not children, not noncitizens, not the mentally incompetent, and not felons. We have certain minimum, objective standards of trustworthiness and commitment to our laws, and some people can’t be presumed to meet those standards—like those who have committed serious crimes against their fellow citizens.
The right to vote can be restored to felons, but it should be done carefully, on a case-by-case basis after a person has shown that he or she has really turned over a new leaf, not automatically on the day someone walks out of prison. After all, the unfortunate truth is that most people who walk out of prison will be walking back in. Read more about this issue in my congressional testimony here.
Second, when it comes to ballot security issues — like voter ID requirements — it is inevitable that a balance will have to be struck between making sure that everyone who is eligible to vote can do so, and making sure that those who are not eligible to vote don’t do so. That balance can be struck in various ways; but the race of those involved should not matter, one way or the other, in how that balance is struck. Lawmakers and courts should not care if this or that group is more likely to be affected by a legitimate effort to stop voter fraud; conversely, of course, if efforts are being made to disenfranchise particular racial groups, that is and should be illegal.
And, finally and similarly, race should not be a factor in redistricting either. There are all kinds of reasons — political, geographic, historical, you name it — for zigging and zagging when these boundaries are drawn, but no zig or zag should come about because of racial considerations. And it doesn’t matter if those racial considerations are “progressive” or “reactionary.”
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The felon voting issue often gets mixed in with opposition to the “War on Drugs” and to “mass incarceration”: The suggestion is that most people who are in prison are in their for drug offenses. But on this point there was an interesting op-ed this week in the Washington Post by a professor at Fordham Law School. I don’t agree with all of it, but the facts that he marshals are important. He sets straight President Obama’s statement recently in his NAACP speech: “But here’s the thing: Over the last few decades, we’ve also locked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before. And that is the real reason our prison population is so high.”
This claim, which is widely accepted by policymakers and the public, is simply wrong. It’s true that nearly half of all federal inmates have been sentenced for drug offenses, but the federal system holds only about 14 percent of all inmates. In the state prisons, which hold the remaining 86 percent, over half of prisoners are serving time for violent crimes, and since 1990, 60 percent of the growth in state prison populations has come from locking up violent offenders. Less than a fifth of state prisoners — 17 percent — are serving time for nonviolent drug offenses.
And contrary to Obama’s claim, drug inmates tend to serve relatively short sentences. It is the inmates who are convicted of violent crimes who serve the longer terms.
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For my sins, I watched the much-hyped MTV show “White People” last week. It was not quite as awful as I feared, and the concluding section on the assimilation of immigrants was actually all right.
The worst part was a segment on scholarships. It featured a white girl who said she was discriminated against in the award of financial aid because of her race, and that minority students were treated preferentially. The narrator of the show purported to disprove this by producing statistics showing that the percentage of white students getting such assistance is higher than the percentage of all students who are white. But that proves nothing. After all, if white students are generally better qualified to receive scholarships than others, that would explain their “overrepresentation” among recipients; and of course this particular girl might have been discriminated against because of her race in any event.
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Some final thoughts on the notion of “white privilege,” which was also discussed on that MTV show.
I’ve noted before that it is, for starters, a divisive phrase, much more likely to hurt race relations than help them, as it lumps together all white people — many of whom cannot be considered “privileged” by any reasonable standard — and points an accusatory finger at them, asserting, “You don’t deserve what you have.” It’s overtly antiwhite.
It is also, at bottom, just another way of complaining about stereotyping, even though all racial groups — indeed, all groups, period — face stereotyping, some negative and some positive, and there’s nothing new or remarkable about it. It overstates the extent to which stereotyping occurs and the consequences it has.
It also seems to me odd to complain about positive stereotyping rather than, as used to be the case, focusing on negative stereotyping. That is, let’s suppose that African Americans tend to be profiled as likely shoplifters and whites aren’t. Doesn’t it make more sense to criticize antiblack profiling than the blame white people for not being profiled?
I have to say that it also seems to me unfortunate to make “privilege” into a negative thing. Privilege is nice, and there should be more of it, for everyone. Rather than have less privilege for some, we should have more privilege for others.
And, finally, playing this particular race card suggests that racial disparities — and, indeed, racial stereotyping — are due solely to racism simpliciter, and have nothing to do with culture and, in particular, cultural dysfunctions. It is, in other words, the “conversation on race” that we have come to expect from the left: All whites must accept blame for all disparities of any kind, and any suggestion that some nonwhites have failed to act responsibly is blaming the victim.
