Essay On Enfranchisement

Given the greater potential benefits and the relatively low consequence to the public en masse, one can contend that every state within the United States of America should adopt the current practices of the international community and extend the right to vote to felony probationers and parolees. The evident majority of the disenfranchised felons reside and work alongside the populous, yet are forbidden from voicing dissent or approval from the legislation that affects their families and themselves. With the gradual increase and rate of disenfranchised citizens this is a crucial moment to reconsider and revise these detrimental policies. Non-incarcerated felons should have suffrage for six reasons outlined in the following paper. Reestablishment of enfranchisement for probationers and parolees would: (I) proffer democracy; (II) diminish racial inequalities in access to the ballot box; (III) promote public wellbeing (as parolees

Today felon disenfranchisement accounts for more than five-million citizen in the U.S. barred from voting (M&U, 2006). This ongoing conflict of ideals between democracy and the harsh actuality of unequal access to and possession of the full rights of citizenship are the core of the practice (Keyssar, 2000). Historically the U.S. has consistently denied suffrage to prisoners, to include those which are on parole, probation, and, even as far as, former felons that are no longer supervised. Disenfranchisement laws are left up to the states in the U.S., and the laws concerning such vary widely from state-to-state about a felon (or former felon’s) right to vote. Presently, thirty-four states prohibit felony parolees suffrage and thirty states proscribe felony probationers suffrage (Sentencing Project, 2008; M&U, 2006). Albeit there is popular inclination towards re-enfranchisement which is evident in recent decades (Behrens, Uggen, and Manza, 2004), the continence remains unyielding in a great number of states (Becker,