Let Prisoners Vote

 I’ve been reading Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum in the hope that learning about one brutal prison system may help shed light on our own. This is the first post in reaction.

I.

            In the late 1930’s, there was a shift in the Soviet gulag system away from “re-forging” the Soviet citizens that landed in the work camps and towards a broader “excommunication” from Soviet society. Guards ceased calling inmates comrades, and barred the inmates from using the term. The camps no longer celebrated civic holidays. Photographs of Stalin hanging from the walls of the buildings and trains disappeared. Foreigners in the camps were surprised to learn that this excommunication had such a powerful effect on Soviet citizens. I can understand the surprise—the Soviet state had arrested the inmates, interrogated them, put them in nightmarish prisons, and shipped them in cattle cars to work camps cutting timber or mining coal. Murder, starvation, and rape were common, dysentery and frostbite more common still. How could inmates be upset by the symbolism of banishment from a society that—in addition to physically banishing them—subjected them to such horrors? But upset the prisoners were.

II.

            In Corey Booker’s new and impressive white paper on criminal justice reform, he argues against the disenfranchisement of ex-felons. Disenfranchisement, he argues, creates a “sub-class that has little or no power over their representatives but is particularly vulnerable to their decisions.” The withholding of voting rights “is counterproductive to the rehabilitation and reintegration of those released from prison into society” and “make[s] the previously incarcerated feel that they will never truly be a part of their community again.”

            Analysis of this sort, of how “the previously incarcerated feel,” is mostly absent from the law school classrooms where I learned how to think about these questions. Those discussions often envision individuals as if they crawled out of microeconomics textbooks. People are perfectly informed, perfectly rational utility maximizers and, thus, perfectly responsive to incentives—or at least close enough that assuming as much produces a more grounded conversation than musing about how ex-offenders “feel.” Up the sentences and crime goes down; make the death penalty available and crime goes down; increase the collateral consequences of incarceration—like the stripping of voting rights—and crime goes down.

            I suspect one reason we enjoy talking about people this way is that it is self-aggrandizing to aspiring young technocrats like us. To young people headed off to work in law and policy, a world in which tweaking of the law results in predictable changes in behavior is a world in which we are important. By playing with different variables in the equation, we can evaluate the straightforward trade-offs and decide in which world we want to live.

            But that world is a fiction. Analyzing incentive structures alone is a lousy way to predict how people will interact with the criminal law. As Tom Tyler demonstrated in Why People Obey the Law, people follow laws when they believe they’re legitimate, not simply because they fear punishment. Tweaking incentives may matter at the margins, but what really matters is the attitude of citizens towards the law’s source.

            Which brings us to elections. People don’t vote in presidential elections because they believe their vote, one of 110 million, may swing the election. Voting is a symbol of participation in the political community. We take time from our day to cast a vote to demonstrate to ourselves and others that we’re participating in the collective project of making a decent life for ourselves.

            If we want ex-prisoners to successfully reenter society, we shouldn’t prevent them from voting; we should beg them to. Booker does a respectable job arguing why, but his explanations are striking in one respect: Not a single one explains why ex-inmates should have the right to vote, but current inmates should not. Even while they’re incarcerated, we don’t want to make inmates “feel that they will never truly be a part of their community again;” especially while they’re incarcerated, we don’t want to take actions “counterproductive to the rehabilitation” of inmates. And the description of a “sub-class that has little or no power over their representatives but is particularly vulnerable to their decisions” describes current inmates far better than it describes former ones. There’s also no reason to believe bestowing of the right to vote requires a trade-off with public safety: Maine and Vermont permit inmates to vote without an apparent turn towards pro-criminal laws, and the research of sociologists Christopher Uggen and Jeff Manza suggests that the act of voting reduced subsequent criminal behavior.

III.

            In Applebaum’s observation, laborers of the gulag so brutalized by a society were nonetheless vulnerable to the pain of being expelled from its symbolic rituals. There is no reason to expel our inmates from the rite of voting and a powerful reason not to—a reduced crime rate for all of us. Booker is right that “voting is a right, not a privilege,” but his logic supports a weightier solution than the one he proposes. We should let prisoners vote.