Inside Voices: We Must Organize a Voting Bloc of Incarcerated People

 

After the D.C. Council’s historic passage of the Restore the Vote Amendment Act that gave incarcerated people convicted of felonies the right to vote in 2020, I composed a brief missive, detailing my observations of the voter registration process for a D.C. prisoner here at USP Big Sandy in Martin County, Kentucky. I mailed a copy to Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office.

In the letter, I thanked Mayor Bowser and the Council for restoring our right to vote and for the opportunity to make our collective voices heard. I also volunteered to help with any efforts to improve on prison voter education and registration and suggested plans for get-out-the-vote drives directed toward our families, friends, and returned citizens.

I requested information and materials that could assist me in educating myself and my fellow D.C. prisoners about the importance and value of exercising our new enfranchisement. Unfortunately, no one from Mayor Bowser’s office bothered to reply. 

In light of Bowser’s ill-conceived and misguided decision to veto the Revised Criminal Code Act, the silence from her office is not surprising to me as a prisoner from the nation’s capital.

I hear White politicians, law enforcement spokespeople, and right-wing media personalities advocating the tough-on-crime line. And when I hear Black elected officials like Mayor Bowser regurgitate the same rhetoric, I reflect back to Black activist Isaiah T. Montgomery, who argued that illiterate Black people should be denied the right to vote.

o add insult to injury, D.C.’s criminal code hasn’t been revised since 1901. At that time, Jim Crow laws were still in effect, the post-Civil War practice of “convict leasing,” which was essentially another form of slavery, was booming, and the NAACP had yet to be established. It seems to me that the people who wrote the 1901 D.C. criminal code did not have the best interest of the African American community in mind.

Now that we, as incarcerated people from D.C., can have a say in who our elected leaders are, maybe that will change. But first, we need some help.

Many Black prisoners are not, and have never been, politically savvy. Without the proper education on the process and the candidates, elections in prison will be reduced to the level of a high school popularity contest. That was the ugly reality I observed here at USP Big Sandy in 2020, the first time incarcerated felons were able to vote.

The majority of my fellow D.C. prisoners were not familiar with many of the candidates on the 2021 ballot other than the political heavies such as Del. Eleanor Holmes-Norton, President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and former president and vice president Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Most incarcerated people had no knowledge of the local candidates.

D.C. prisoners who lived with me in the B2 housing unit at USP Big Sandy also had difficulty filling out the voter registration form. I assisted several prisoners after staff refused to answer their questions, and I discovered that quite a few of them do not know the last four digits of their social security numbers—another issue I had mentioned in my letter to the mayor’s office.the D.C. Board of Elections on Sept. 28, 2021, detailing three common mistakes on our voter registration applications.

1) Failure to include a D.C. address

2) Failure to sign and date

Unsurprisingly, D.C. prisoners (myself included) began to receive