After working at Project Vote for a week, I had the opportunity to attend the 2016 Midwest
Political Science Association (MPSA) Conference. While in graduate school, I heard a lot of wonderful things about this conference, but I never had the opportunity to attend. My experience proved to be fruitful, as I had the chance to network with several voting rights experts and attend several engaging panels on voting research.
One of the most interesting, soon-to-be released papers I came across at the MPSA conference was entitled, “Community Political Effects of Criminal Justice Supervision and Disenfranchisement” by Allison Anoll and Mackenzie Israel-Trummel, Ph.D. Several studies in political science explore the deleterious effects of mass incarceration on the political behavior and efficacy of people with past felony convictions. Anoll and Israel-Trummel, however, provide a unique perspective to studying the effects of mass incarceration, as they study the political behavior among black Americans who have not been to prison themselves, but have been in close contact with felons, probationers or parolees. The authors do this by conducting survey research with a nationally represented sample of black Americans and explore how the composition of respondents’ social networks (i.e. close family or friends) interacts with the policy regime (i.e. a state’s felon disenfranchisement law) in their state to shape their likelihood to engage in politics beyond voting. The authors find that in states where probationers have the right to vote, black Americans who have parolees or ex-felons in their social networks are associated with an increase in participating in high-cost political activity such as attending a community meeting or protest.*
“[S]tate laws that franchise probationers have a positive impact on political behavior of their friends and families who have not had any contact with the justice system.”
Personally, I found their paper very interesting because too often, conversations around mass incarceration does not involve a discussion of what the removal of these people have on their families and communities. Their study, however, not only considers the impact of mass incarceration on the communities and families involved, but demonstrates that state laws that franchise probationers have a positive impact on political behavior of their friends and families who have not had any contact with the justice system. Hence, this article provides evidence that “[r]estoring voting rights would not only restore a sense of political inclusion to those who have been shut out of the political process, it would boost political engagement among their friends and families.”
*The authors chose to focus on African Americans, as this group has historically had a lot more contact with police and the criminal justice system in general when compared to other racial and ethnic groups. The authors plan to do more work in this area to see how their results might differ across different racial and ethnic groups.