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US reacts to major prisoner swap with Russia: ‘feat of diplomacy’ and ‘joyous’
by Evelyn Reynolds 1 August 2024, 19:55
The White House celebrated a “feat of diplomacy” on Thursday after a major prisoner swap between Russia and the west that included the release of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former US marine Paul Whelan, among others.Both are US citizens accused by Russian authorities of espionage, charges they and the US government have denied, and a possible exchange had been mooted for months.The exchange on Thursday occurred at Ankara airport in Turkey, and involved people held in seven different countries including the US, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway, Russia and Belarus. The Turkish presidency said 10 prisoners were relocated to Russia, 13 prisoners to Germany and three to the US.Among the prisoners returning to Russia was the assassin Vadim Krasikov, who had been held in a German prison since 2019 for murdering a Chechen exile in Berlin in broad daylight.Joe Biden said in a statement immediately following the news that the three American citizens and one American green card holder were “unjustly” imprisoned in Russia – in addition to Gershkovich and Whelan, the other two are Alsu Kurmasheva, a US-Russian journalist, and Vladimir Kara-Murza – “was a feat of diplomacy”.“All told, we’ve negotiated the release of 16 people from Russia – including five Germans and seven Russian citizens who were political prisoners in their own country. Some of these women and men have been unjustly held for years. All have endured unimaginable suffering and uncertainty. Today, their agony is over.”Biden added he was grateful to the allies of the US who “stood with us throughout tough, complex negotiations to achieve this outcome”.He said: “This is a powerful example of why it’s vital to have friends in this world whom you can trust and depend upon. Our alliances make Americans safer.”Shortly afterward, Biden delivered remarks from the White House, surrounded by family members of the freed prisoners.“This is a very good afternoon,” the president said, adding that he and the family members had been able to speak to the released prisoners on the phone.He also asked the room to sing happy birthday to 12-year-old Miriam, daughter of Kurmasheva, who he said is turning 13 on Friday.The swap is likely to be considered a political coup for Biden in the waning months of his presidency, and a blow to Donald Trump, who has claimed on the 2024 campaign trail that he would free Gershkovich if re-elected.Trump has frequently voiced admiration for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and said in May on his social media site, Truth Social, that if he won the November election, Gershkovich would be “released almost immediately after the election, but definitely before I assume office”, adding that Putin would “do that for me, but not for anyone else”.Kamala Harris, the vice-president and frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for president, echoed Biden’s words on Thursday and added: “I will not stop working until every American who is wrongfully detained or held hostage is brought home.”On Thursday, White House’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said Biden and Harris would welcome the released US citizens at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, and that Gershkovich, Whelan and Kurmasheva were expected to arrive on US soil on Thursday night.Emma Tucker, the editor of the Wall Street Journal, described the event as a “joyous day” for friends, family and colleagues of Gershkovich, and the “the millions of well-wishers in the US and around the world who stood with Evan and defended the free press”.Current and former US government officials and press freedom groups similarly rejoiced at the news.Barack Obama described the exchange as a “tremendous diplomatic achievement” and noted the “skill and persistence” of Biden, Harris and US allies.Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists, welcomed the news but said “it does not change the fact that Russia continues to suppress a free press”. Reporters Without Borders said they were “relieved” but said more than 40 other journalists remain detained in Russia.On Thursday afternoon, Trump criticized the swap on Truth Social, calling it a “bad” deal. “So when are they going to release the details of the prisoner swap with Russia? How many people do we get versus them? Are we also paying them cash?” he asked.Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, said that no money was exchanged. He said no sanctions were loosened to facilitate the deal.The swap comes a year and a half after the Biden administration secured the release of US basketball star Brittney Griner in late 2022, who had been held in Russian jail for almost 10 months on drug charges and was freed in exchange for the arms dealer Viktor Bout. At the time, Biden expressed regret that the deal did not include Whelan, who had been detained since 2018.Earlier in 2022, the Biden administration also secured the release of former US marine Trevor Reed, who was arrested in 2019 after Russian authorities said he assaulted an officer while being driven by police to a police station after a night of heavy drinking. Reed was released in exchange for a convicted Russian drug trafficker who was serving a long prison sentence in the US. More
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Phone calls from prison are finally being capped at 6 cents a minute. But there’s more to do | Katrina vanden Heuvel
by Evelyn Reynolds 31 July 2024, 17:30
You’d be forgiven for falling behind on your federal regulatory news this past month. But amid the chaos of an assassination attempt on the Republican nominee, the self-removal of the Democratic nominee, the meme-ification of the current vice-president, and a flat Diet Mountain Dew joke from her would-be successor, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed a historic measure that will change the lives of millions of incarcerated people and their loved ones.For decades, activists and lawmakers have fought to reduce the cost of calls from prison. As I wrote about in 2021, many prisoners and their loved ones have paid as much as a dollar or more per minute to stay in touch. This exorbitant cost has disproportionately driven women and people of color into debt, while the correctional telecom industry – about 80% of which is controlled by just two companies – extracted over $1.4bn a year.Under the FCC’s new rule, this exploitative environment is finally changing. The cost of a phone call from prison will be capped at 6 cents per minute, and video call charges won’t exceed 16 cents per minute. Rates will vary in jails depending on population size, but the implication remains the same: in America, incarcerated people can no longer be gouged for wanting to connect with their loved ones.That’s the immediate benefit. Over the long term, the FCC’s new rule has the potential to open another important channel of communication: a national discussion about the rights of incarcerated people.Technically, this reform was made possible by Joe Biden signing the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act last January. That law granted the FCC the regulatory authority to set call prices within state lines, instead of just across them. But the credit truly belongs to longtime activists, including the law’s namesake. Wright-Reed was a Black, blind grandmother who sued CoreCivic, then the Corrections Corporation of America, over two decades ago for running up her phone bill while she kept in touch with her incarcerated grandson. Even before a law with her name landed on the Resolute desk, she and countless advocates had successfully pressured the FCC to begin reducing the cost of prison telecommunications.For such activists, the FCC’s new regulations represent a good start – and just that. They have a broader agenda of sweeping yet sensible reforms to tackle next. Several states – California, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Minnesota – have made calls completely free, a move the other 45 state legislatures could follow. And telecom companies are still charging families for digital messages – which the FCC concluded the Martha Wright-Reed Act does not allow them to regulate. Exploitative practices like that one illustrate just how deep the need for reform is within this industry.But further progress could be stymied by our nation’s ambivalent attitudes toward incarcerated people. While 80% support criminal justice reform in theory, they’re not aligned on what reform looks like. In fact, 58% of Americans don’t think that this country’s criminal justice system is tough enough – a disturbing spike from the record low of 41% in 2020.If America’s policies affecting the incarcerated are going to change, America’s perceptions of the incarcerated might have to change first. And across culture and politics, there may soon be such an opportunity.Just this month, US theaters showed A24’s Sing Sing, a moving drama based on the true story of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program, which aims to break the cycle of incarceration by allowing prisoners to explore their humanity through performance. The film, which some call an early Best Picture frontrunner, stars Colman Domingo alongside a cast of formerly incarcerated actors – actual alumni of the program. They join a generation of formerly incarcerated artists – like the poet and 2021 MacArthur fellow Reginald Dwayne Betts – who are using their talents to urge a national shift from contempt to compassion.Meanwhile, this election cycle, the word “incarceration” has been uttered almost exclusively in conjunction with Donald Trump’s 34 convictions. Kamala Harris has used her courtroom chops to prove she can prosecute the case against her opponent. But in embracing this aspect of her political background, the vice-president could risk alienating criminal justice advocates. They may remember her less compassionate actions as California’s attorney general, like refusing supreme court orders to relieve prison overcrowding so the state could keep using inmates’ $2-a-day labor for firefighting. If Harris wants to underscore the “progressive” part of her progressive prosecutor brand, it may behoove her to offer a plan to improve prison conditions for the 2 million people currently serving their sentences.A good way to start could be recruiting a running mate who restored voting rights to a historic 140,000 felons, or passed legislation to overhaul their state’s parole system, or signed a sweeping criminal justice reform package. But regardless of the VP’s pick, Harris has the power to offer a progressive platform of ambitious change for the incarcerated individuals who are still being denied their right to vote, be paid for their labor and be protected from inhumane conditions like solitary confinement.Though Wright-Reed died almost a decade ago, her grandson reflected on her legacy by saying: “It’s just amazing how far [the movement] has come because of the steps that she took at the very beginning.”
Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of the Nation, she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has contributed to the Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times More
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She was sentenced to prison for voting. Her story is part of a Republican effort to intimidate others
by Evelyn Reynolds 10 June 2024, 13:00
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American psyche: a new series exploring the angst at the heart of the American election
It was the day of the full solar eclipse on the outskirts of Fort Worth last April, and Crystal Mason was trying, just for a second, to relax.She was barefoot, her feet curled up on a big leather La-Z-Boy sofa, eating two of the turkey sandwiches she had prepared for lunch for her family. Her granddaughter Courtney was turning five that weekend, and Mason was getting everything in place for a princess-themed party.Mason, 49, had every reason to celebrate. Just a few weeks earlier, a Texas appeals court had thrown out her five-year prison sentence for voter fraud. Mason had been fighting the charge ever since 2017, when she was arrested for trying to cast a provisional ballot while ineligible to vote. She has always said she did not know she could not vote and would not have tried to cast a ballot had she known.Mason had been convicted and sentenced to five years in prison in 2018.Her case touched a national nerve and became widely understood as an egregious punishment for what could easily be explained as a mistake. As Donald Trump claimed massive voter fraud in the 2016 election, Mason’s case was seen as part of a broader Republican effort to intimidate people from voting. And while Trump escalated claims of fraud through the 2020 election and its aftermath, Mason’s case stood out as a clear example of what an indiscriminate crackdown on voter fraud looks like.View image in fullscreenSince Mason’s arrest, efforts to prosecute voter fraud have only escalated. Tarrant county, where Mason lives, launched its own voter fraud taskforce. Several Republican-led states have created units to investigate and pursue voter fraud charges. One of those units, in Florida, has filed dozens of cases, almost all of which have been against people like Mason, who have prior felony convictions and were confused about their eligibility. In the initial wave of 20 people who were arrested, 14 were Black. One of them was arrested at gunpoint.“I’m certain these prosecutions of individuals with felony convictions instill fear, which I believe is the intended outcome,” said Dawn Harrington, the executive director of the Free Hearts organization, who works to restore voting rights to people with felony convictions. In Tennessee, where Harrington works, she’s seen prosecutions in at least five counties (the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation announced 11 arrests for voter fraud last week, but offered few details on what happened). Taken in context of a historical legacy of voter suppression, Harrington said she believed high-profile prosecutions “serve as stark warnings, showing severe consequences for attempting to vote”.Since being convicted, Mason has remained out of prison on an appeal bond for several years, trying to get her life back on track. She’s lost multiple jobs and had trouble getting new ones because of the bad publicity from her case, and nearly lost her home to foreclosure. The last few years of waiting had felt like having “one foot in, one foot out”, she said. Her kids and her mother said that some nights she would come home and cry.So when she got news of the acquittal in March, Mason, who was getting dinner at a drive-through at the time, broke down crying. It was a moment of vindication – and a sign that she could move on with her life.Then the district attorney announced he was appealing the case.‘I’m the sole breadwinner in my family. I don’t want to go back to prison’People with felony convictions make ripe targets for politicians wanting to send a message about voter fraud.Since the Jim Crow era, states have barred former felons from voting, a practice that kept many African Americans from the polls even after they were constitutionally granted the right to vote.Today, 48 states continue this practice, though the rules vary widely by state. Several – like California, Colorado and New York – allow anyone to vote when they complete their prison sentence, while others require completion of probation and parole. Some states, like Mississippi and Tennessee, permanently bar those convicted of certain crimes from ever voting, while others require repayment of all fines, fees and restitution before someone can vote again.It’s a legacy that continues to have broad implications. As of 2022, an estimated 4.4 million people – 2% of the adult eligible population – couldn’t vote because of a felony conviction, according to a 2022 analysis by the Sentencing Project, a criminal-justice non-profit. Around 5% of voting-age African Americans can’t vote because of a felony conviction – a rate more than three times higher than other Americans.The vast majority of people who can’t vote because of a felony – about 75% – are not in prison – but they are an easy target for perceived voter fraud. Since they are branded criminals, there’s little public sympathy for their cases; those charged often have little interest in speaking out publicly.A single prosecution can also have a big ripple effect. Those who are trying to put their criminal history behind them know that a single misstep can land them back in trouble, so they aren’t willing to take that risk.Since Mason was arrested, there have been a few more high-profile prosecutions of people with felony convictions. In 2021, Texas authorities arrested Hervis Rogers, a Houston man who gained national attention for waiting seven hours in line to vote. The case was eventually thrown out on appeal, but Rogers, who is Black, has since said he will never vote again.View image in fullscreenIn 2022, Pamela Moses, a Black woman in Tennessee, was sentenced to six years in prison for trying to vote while on probation for a felony. Her conviction was later overturned after the Guardian published government documents that were not disclosed to her defense.Perhaps no state has deployed this strategy more aggressively than Florida. In 2022, the state governor, Ron DeSantis, created the office of election crimes and security, a first-of-its-kind agency to crack down on election fraud, which is exceedingly rare. That summer, DeSantis held a televised press conference announcing the arrests of more than 20 people for illegally voting. The press conference announcing the arrest was a spectacle – DeSantis appeared at in a courtroom, flanked by uniformed law enforcement officers. All of the people charged had prior murder or sexual offenses, which made them permanently ineligible to vote in Florida.But after DeSantis’s press conference, it became clear that nearly everyone charged was confused about their eligibility. Florida had made it easier for people with many felony convictions to vote in 2019, and the people the state was targeting appeared to not understand that the change didn’t apply to them. All had received voter registration cards from the state, a sign they took to mean they were eligible to vote.View image in fullscreenBlair Bowie, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center, specializes in assisting people with felony convictions get their voting rights back. One of the states where she works is Alabama, where a recent change in the law has increased the number of people with felonies who can vote. But Bowie said she had been in contact with people in Alabama who were newly re-enfranchised but had heard about the Florida prosecutions and were wary of trying to register to vote.After initially expressing interest in getting their rights back, some of the people she had spoken to told her it wasn’t worth it.“I’m the sole breadwinner in my family. I can’t do this,” they told her. “I don’t want to go back to prison.”‘You can hardly talk to Crystal without her trying to sign someone up to vote’Mason wasn’t especially political in 2016: she voted because her mother was nagging her to. Until recently, she compared voting to taking a shower after playing outside before you go to bed. “It’s just something you’re supposed to do.”When she showed up at her polling station in 2016, a church near her home, election workers couldn’t find her name on the list of registered voters, so they offered her a chance to vote with a provisional ballot, intended for exactly that kind of circumstance.If a voter shows up at the polls and there’s a question about their eligibility, they can cast a provisional vote that is only counted if officials later confirm the voter is eligible to cast a ballot. Mason filled out the affidavit that went along with the ballot, taking care to ensure that all of the information exactly matched what was on her driver’s license.The poll workers had no reason to question her eligibility – they were her neighbors and knew who she was. They knew that she wasn’t lying about her identity and presented a valid Texas driver’s license.It was only after she left that Jarrod Streibich, a high school teenager volunteering in his first election, said he remembered that Mason had recently returned home from federal prison for a tax felony.Texas, like several other states, doesn’t allow someone to vote until they have entirely finished their criminal sentence, including probation or parole. Streibich alerted the head poll worker, Karl Diederich, who lived across the street from Mason. Diederich, who was involved with the local Republican party, wasn’t sure whom to call, but he would later contact the local district attorney.Mason was one of about 4,000 people in Tarrant county who cast a provisional ballot in 2016. Several months later, she would become the only one to be indicted for it. In February 2017, she was placed in handcuffs at the federal courthouse in downtown Dallas during a routine check-in with her supervised release officer.View image in fullscreenSince she was arrested for voter fraud, Mason said she went from being someone who didn’t want to talk about politics to starting an organization focused on combating voter suppression.In 2022, she opened a rally for Beto O’Rourke, who was running for governor. Texas lawmakers passed a law designed to make it harder for someone like Mason to be prosecuted for voter fraud. Four of her children and several other family members are volunteer deputy voter registrars in Texas and are eligible to sign people up to vote.“You can hardly talk to Crystal Mason for five minutes without her trying to sign someone up to vote,” Alison Grinter, one of her attorneys, said in March.But there was never really any doubt that Crystal Mason’s case was about much more than Crystal Mason. Prosecutors said it themselves at her trial.“The voting system in America is second to none. It is sacred to Americans, and she has violated the sanctity of this process,” Matthew Smid, the prosecutor during Mason’s case, said during sentencing at her trial. “We respectfully request that this court send a message to illegal voters that if you’re going to violate the sanctity of this system, it will not be tolerated and [you] will pay the consequences.”That language set off alarm bells for Kim Cole, another of Mason’s lawyers. Voter fraud in the US is extremely rare; many cases of illegal voting often involve people who simply were confused about their eligibility to vote. During the Jim Crow era, lawmakers often invoked the need to preserve the purity of the ballot box to justify racist restrictions on voting.“It’s not even subtle,” Cole said. “I think it did intimidate people.”‘There’s no way I would have ever taken a plea’It would have been easy enough for Mason to make the case go away. Before she went to trial in 2018, prosecutors offered her the chance to plead guilty and receive 10 years of probation. Many in her position accept these kinds of offers; it’s part of why prosecutors often target people with felony convictions – those who are charged are willing to plead guilty quickly, giving prosecutors a conviction they can tout.But Mason believed she hadn’t done anything wrong. And since she was already on supervised release, she risked going back to federal prison if she pleaded guilty to the voting crime. “There’s no way I would have ever taken a plea,” she said. “If I’m pleading, that means I’m leaving my kids. And I could never – me being a mom – I could never just leave my kids.”So on 28 March 2018, Mason and her entire family showed up at the criminal courthouse in downtown Fort Worth. Mason’s lawyer had assured her that it would be an “open and closed” case and so Mason had only taken one day off from her new job (she had lost her old one when she was arrested).View image in fullscreenThe trial started off pretty well. The first witness was Kenneth Mays, a supervisor in the supervised release office. He testified that no one had told Mason she couldn’t vote.But when Diederich and Streibich took the stand, things went south. Diederich, a navy veteran who had recently returned from Afghanistan, testified that he had instructed Mason to read a lengthy disclaimer on the provisional affidavit before she filled it out. Buried in the long paragraph is language requiring anyone filling out the form to affirm that if they have been convicted of a felony, they have completed “all of my punishment, including any term of incarceration, parole, and supervision”.Diederich testified that he couldn’t say for sure whether Mason read the warning, but that it appeared that she did and he wouldn’t have let her vote if he didn’t think she had. Streibich, just a few weeks from leaving for the air force academy, testified that he saw Mason going over the form with her finger.When Mason took the stand, it hardly seemed to matter what she said. She said she had never even seen Diederich at the polls and never read the affidavit. Had anyone told her she wasn’t eligible, she said, she wouldn’t have voted. “Why would I dare jeopardize losing a good job, saving my house, and leaving my kids again and missing my son from graduating from high school this year as well as going to college on a football scholarship? I wouldn’t dare do that,” she said.But Smid, the prosecutor, focused on undermining her credibility. Who should the judge believe? Diederich, the navy veteran, and Streibich, who was committed to military service, or Mason, who had old convictions for tax fraud and perjury? He dismissed the idea she wouldn’t commit a crime because she wanted to support her family. “You were not thinking about them when you defrauded the United States government of $4.2m, were you?” Smid said. (Mason, a former tax preparer, was originally convicted in 2012 on charges related to inflating tax refunds for clients and was ordered to pay $4.2m in restitution.)Gonzalez convicted her and sentenced her to five years in prison. Mason was in disbelief.News outlets started to pick up on the case. Her conviction came after another woman in Tarrant county, a legal non-citizen, had been sentenced to seven years in prison for also mistakenly voting. Around the same time, there was a white justice of the peace in the same county who pleaded guilty to forging signatures on a ballot but was sentenced to probation and no prison time.The disparity between the sentences for the two women of color and a white elected official highlighted the blunt racial disparities that seemed to be at play. Still, Mason didn’t really want to speak out about the case. “My motto has always been ‘my business is not show business’,” she said. That, and she wanted to keep her job.View image in fullscreenThat all changed a few months later. Because Mason was still on supervised release while she had been convicted of the state crime, she was sent back to federal prison for an additional 10 months.This was an especially difficult time for Mason. When she had gotten out of prison the first time, she had vowed never to go back and had pledged to take care of her family.Calling her the breadwinner doesn’t quite capture what she means to her family. She has three children of her own, and raised four of her brother’s children. She also has nine grandchildren. Until fairly recently, they all lived with her in her big house.Her 25-year-old niece, Jasmine Jones, compared her to the cornerstone of a building. Without her, she said, everything would crumble. Her son Sanford, whom she calls Bobo, agreed. “She’s the boss of the company,” he said. “She provides all of the kids with the things they need.”When she went back to federal prison at the end of 2018, she trained Taylor, her daughter, on how to manage the family’s finances. At the time, Taylor had not even ever paid a phone bill. Her teenage son left college during his freshman year on a football scholarship, returning home to help with the finances. The family almost lost their big house on the outskirts of Fort Worth – the one she and her ex-husband purchased more than a decade ago to be a home base for their family – to foreclosure.“They don’t know the strain it took on our family,” Taylor said on the afternoon of the eclipse, keeping an eye on her three-year-old son, Karter, who was running around nearby.Back in federal prison, Mason started reflecting on her case. She knew the judge who convicted and sentenced her was elected by voters, and she began to understand the power of one vote – and why someone would want to limit hers.She decided that she would start an organization and speak out about her case, seeking to educate people who had felony convictions about their right to vote. “I wasn’t able to register people to vote, but I was able to speak and tell people and share my story,” she said. “I had my kids and family registering people to vote.”After she left prison, she started an organization called Crystal Mason The Fight. She and her children go to fairs and other events to register people to vote. Recently, Mason said, she was at an Autozone. She began speaking with the man who was helping her and asked him if he was registered to vote. He said he wasn’t because he had a felony conviction seven or eight years ago. Mason said he was surprised to learn there was a possibility that he could vote again if he was done with his sentence.“We need to be educated from state to state,” Mason said. “That’s what I want to do – I want to outreach and reach out to people that are eligible to vote and let them know they have that right to vote.”‘My heart is heavy’The district attorney’s decision to appeal Mason’s case in April was an odd one.In 2020, the second court of criminal appeals had given prosecutors a major victory when it upheld Mason’s conviction. The panel said that what mattered was not whether Mason knew she was ineligible to vote, but whether she was on supervised release.“Contrary to Mason’s assertion, the fact that she did not know she was legally ineligible to vote was irrelevant to her prosecution,” Justice Wade Birdwell wrote for the panel. Even though Mason may not have known for sure whether she could vote, the fact that she signed anyway showed that she affirmed her eligibility.In 2022, the Texas court of criminal appeals, the highest court in Texas, reversed that decision – the first legal victory for Mason in five years. The court said there was not enough evidence that Mason “actually realized” she could not vote, prompting her acquittal two years later in March.View image in fullscreenMason’s lawyers weren’t really expecting an appeal. The Texas court of criminal appeals had already signaled its skepticism of the case. The original prosecutor who indicted Mason, a Republican named Sharen Wilson, had retired and it wasn’t clear that the new district attorney, Republican Phil Sorrels, would want to get tied up in the case. “This is not the kind of opinion you appeal,” Grinter, Mason’s attorney, said in April.A Sorrels spokeswoman did not respond to an interview request. But when he appealed the decision in April, he said in a statement that the appellate court had wrongly weighed the evidence in Mason’s favor. On 8 May, he said publicly that he was appealing the case to send a message.“I want would-be illegal voters to know that we’re watching,” Sorrells said. “We’ll follow the law and we would prosecute illegal voting,” he told county commissioners at a briefing that Mason attended, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.In 2022, Mason decided to vote again. Her federal supervised release had expired, and since the illegal voting charge was still under appeal, her lawyers told her she could vote. “It was more personal, and more important to me,” she said. Mason said she had met a woman, a local county commissioner, who had told her her story inspired her to run for office.Cole, one of Mason’s lawyers, praised her client’s political transformation, but also said it was an unlikely story. “Can you imagine the expense that someone would have had to bear had they just been doing this on their own?” she said. “You just don’t have the muscle to fight.”A few weeks later, when the state announced it was appealing the case, Mason expressed exasperation in a text message. “I just don’t understand,” she wrote.“My heart is very, very heavy right now,” she said. “I’m truly sadden[ed] at this moment that the state in this upcoming election is still sending a message.”:root{–ap-border-color: rgba(255,255,255,.2);–ap-background-blue: #052962;–ap-background-black: #1a1a1a}.furniture-wrapper #headline h1,[data-layout=InteractiveLayout] .furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=headline] h1,.furniture-wrapper .headline h1{font-size:32px;line-height:1}@media (min-width: 71.25em){.furniture-wrapper #headline h1,[data-layout=InteractiveLayout] .furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=headline] h1,.furniture-wrapper .headline h1{font-size:48px}}.gu-janky-word{display:inline-block;margin-right:.35em}.gu-janky-letter{display:inline-block}nav >div{border-bottom:1px solid var(–ap-border-color)}.furniture-wrapper{background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,var(–ap-background-blue),var(–ap-background-black) 40%);display:grid;grid-template-areas:”title” “headline” “main-image” “standfirst” “lines” “meta”;–byline-anchor: #dcdcdc}.furniture-wrapper:after,.furniture-wrapper:before{background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,var(–ap-background-blue),var(–ap-background-black) 40%);border-color:#fff3!important}.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=title]{padding-top:10px;margin-bottom:-15px;z-index:2}.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=title] span:nth-of-type(2){display:none}.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=title] a{margin-right:0}.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=title] img{height:100%;width:190px}@media (min-width: 61.25em){.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=title]{margin-bottom:0}.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=title] img{width:150px}}.furniture-wrapper #headline,.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=headline],.furniture-wrapper .headline{border-color:var(–ap-border-color)!important}.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=meta]{–new-pillar-colour: #dcdcdc}.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=meta] details{–dateline: #97999e}article .furniture-wrapper figure{grid-area:main-image;width:auto!important}article .furniture-wrapper figure img{margin:0 auto;max-width:380px;width:70%}@media (min-width: 61.25em){article .furniture-wrapper figure img{max-width:100%;width:100%}}@media (min-width: 61.25em){article .furniture-wrapper figure{margin-top:0!important}}@media (min-width: 71.25em){article .furniture-wrapper figure{grid-area:1/8/4/14!important}}@media (min-width: 81.25em){article .furniture-wrapper figure{grid-area:1/10/4/16!important}}#maincontent h2,.prose h2{max-width:620px;font-weight:700;margin-top:80px;margin-bottom:5px;position:relative;–rotate-h2: 1deg}#maincontent h2:before,.prose h2:before{content:””;background-image:linear-gradient(90deg,var(–ap-background-blue),var(–ap-background-black));height:15px;width:100%;position:absolute;top:-15px;left:0;transform:rotate(var(–rotate-h2))}#maincontent blockquote,.prose blockquote{font-size:18px;margin:20px 0;font-weight:700}body.ios .furniture-wrapper figure.element-image img,body.android .furniture-wrapper figure.element-image img{margin:0 auto;width:70%!important}body.ios #meta span[data-icon],body.android #meta span[data-icon]{color:#ff5943!important}body.ios #meta span[data-icon]:before,body.android #meta span[data-icon]:before{color:#1a1a1a!important}body.ios .prose p+h2,body.android .prose p+h2{margin:80px 0 15px;line-height:1.5}body.ios .prose p+h2:before,body.android .prose p+h2:before{top:-20px}body.ios .prose blockquote:before,body.android .prose blockquote:before{color:#ff5943}body.ios .content__labels,body.android .content__labels{margin-bottom:-17px}body.ios .content__labels img,body.android .content__labels img{width:190px} More
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Billion-dollar prisons: why the US is pouring money into new construction
by Evelyn Reynolds 28 October 2023, 11:00
At a time when the US has narrowly skirted a recession, and people around the country are still struggling with the cost of living, a curious number of states have found billions of dollars for one thing: building prisons and jails.In September, Alabama announced that a new prison, currently under construction, would have a final cost of $1.082bn. The same month Indiana broke ground on a $1.2bn prison. Nebraska is spending $350m on a new prison, while some in Georgia are lobbying for $1.69bn for construction of a jail in Fulton county.The willingness to spend vast amounts of money on locking people up, particularly in states like Alabama, which has one of the highest poverty rates in the country, is staggering. It’s also wrong-headed, experts say.“Any money spent on caging human beings is not money well spent, period,” said Carmen Gutierrez, an assistant professor in the department of public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose research specializes in the connection between punishment and health.“We have decades of research showing that incarceration does not improve public safety, and that it in fact harms individuals who themselves are incarcerated. It also harms their families and it harms the communities that they come from. So the damage outweighs any potential benefit.”The US has an incarceration rate of 664 people in every 100,000, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, far higher than other founding Nato countries. (The next highest is the UK, where 129 out of every 100,000 people are behind bars.)That amounts to 1.8 million people incarcerated across the country, but the numbers are not spread evenly. In Alabama, Georgia and other southern states about one in every 100 people is incarcerated in prisons, jails, immigration detention and juvenile justice facilities.The number of people being locked up has declined, somewhat, since the middle of the last decade, but some facts about incarceration remain the same: not all races are incarcerated equally.Black people make up 13% of the US population, but 38% of the prison, jail and other detention facility population, according to Prison Policy Initiative data. White people are far less likely to be caged: despite 60% of the US identifying as white, they also account for 38% of incarcerated people.“Incarceration is a highly gendered and racialized phenomenon,” Gutierrez said. “People who are males make up around 90% of people who go to jail and prison, and people who are black and brown – typically people who are Latino or Indigenous – are making up those who are disproportionately incarcerated.”The mammoth US prison population can be traced to the 1970s, with Richard Nixon’s “tough on crime” and “law and order” rhetoric, but it really exploded in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was president.The Fair Fight Initiative, which works to end mass incarceration and systemic racism, says there are a multitude of reasons why the US cages so many people – including the disastrous “war on drugs”, mandatory minimum sentences, exorbitant bail and a lack of mental health services.The tough on crime rhetoric has endured to this day. Violent crime was a huge focus for Republican candidates during the 2022 midterm elections, while Donald Trump has taken to describing big cities as “cesspools of bloodshed and crime”.Trump, who lives in a spa resort in Florida and generally travels only for political rallies or court appearances, has offered no evidence for his claim.Despite the raft of research showing incarceration does more harm than good, few states are seriously attempting to reduce the number of people in jail.In January, Kay Ivey, the governor of Alabama, introduced new laws concerning how inmates could earn early release for good behavior, in a move critics said would lead to more overcrowding in the state’s prisons. Ivey has also been a key driver behind the state’s costly new prison.“The new prison facilities being built in Alabama are critically important to public safety, to our criminal justice system and to Alabama as a whole,” Ivey said in September.Alabama, which was ranked as the seventh poorest state by US News, has the fifth lowest household income in the country and is a place where a child born in 2020 could expect to live to be only 73 years old.It is also one of 10 largely Republican-led states that has declined to use federal government resources to expand Medicaid – a healthcare program for low-income residents – to more residents, which Gutierrez said can lead to people ending up in incarceration, or being re-incarcerated.“To deny Medicaid expansion in a state is to exacerbate the health and wellbeing issues of poor people who are the ones cycling through jails and prisons due to their poverty and poor health,” she said.“Folks who are formerly incarcerated, their health status may be determining their likelihood of going to jail and prison in the first place. Because if I’m sick, and I’m not working because I’m sick, and if I have mental illness or a substance use disorder, I’m more visible to the police, I’m more visible to punishment, and that thus increases my chances of being sent to jail or prison.”In Georgia, which has also opted out of expanded Medicaid, officials are attempting to source $1.7bn for a new prison near Atlanta, with little sign that politicians are considering spending the money elsewhere. Indiana’s $1.2bn facility is scheduled to open in 2027.One thing most can agree is that conditions in many of America’s jails are dire.Earlier this year, Atteeyah Hollie, deputy director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, told the Guardian there “are daily horrors that are happening” in Georgia’s Fulton county jail – which the new facility would replace.The Department of Justice opened an investigation into the jail in July, citing reports that “an incarcerated person died covered in insects and filth, that the Fulton county jail is structurally unsafe, that prevalent violence has resulted in serious injuries and homicides”.In Alabama, a majority of prisons don’t have air-conditioning, which the Montgomery Advertiser reported made conditions “hell” during a summer where the heat index reached 115F (46C).Both states have committed to improving conditions, but it is hard to shake the sense that the billions being spent on new prisons and jails would be better used elsewhere.Jacob Kang-Brown, senior research fellow at Vera Institute, which works to end over-criminalization and mass incarceration, said the funds should be put towards education and affordable housing, and supporting robust access to healthcare.“The social welfare safety net in the US has been underinvested in for decades. That is part of the reason why we have such a huge investment in incarceration. It’s really a negative cycle,” Kang-Brown said.As president, Trump signed the bipartisan First Step Act, a prison and sentencing reform bill which expanded rehabilitative opportunities for incarcerated people, increased the possibility of early parole for good behavior and reduced mandatory minimum sentences for a number of drug-related crimes.At the time, the act was championed by Republicans, Democrats and advocates.But in the 2022 midterm elections, amid a rise in some forms of violent crime, Republicans began to distance themselves from the First Step Act, while Trump, despite his role in the legislation, would not say whether he still supports it when asked by the New York Times. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s closest rival for the GOP presidential nomination, has said he would repeal it.“There are a lot of concerns about public safety, and politicians want to throw money at that problem often, as opposed to thinking hard about what that might mean and how to best address those problems,” Kang-Brown said.“Many people are seemingly more comfortable with investing in law enforcement and prisons to address those things, other than the real kind of investments, like affordable housing, for instance, that can actually improve public safety in a real substantive way.” More
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US prison labor is cruel and pointless legalized slavery. I know first-hand | Dyjuan Tatro
by Evelyn Reynolds 22 September 2023, 10:10
Almost immediately after I was sent to prison, I was assigned to a “program”, the term American prison officials use for a job. I was to sweep the prison hallways, alongside roughly 30 other men. Together we pushed brooms across gray corridors hour after hour, day after day.No matter how many hours I worked, I couldn’t afford toilet paper, soap or toothpaste. We had to pay for basic hygiene products at exploitative markups, way more than they cost in free society, and I was paid 10 cents an hour. To survive in prison, even with a full-time job, I was forced to rely on family, who struggled to support me financially.There’s a misleading narrative pushed by officials about prison labor, one that falsely frames prison jobs as rehabilitative. Nothing could be further from the truth.In prison, my work was meaningless and dehumanizing. It conveyed no new skills, taught me no life lessons and earned me next to nothing. It did not build my résumé, prepare me to navigate workplace relationships or teach me how to budget. It served only to devalue my labor and person. Prisons are about punishment, not rehabilitation.I had no choice in whether I went to work or not – and there were no sick days. If I didn’t go, I would be locked in my cell for 23 hours a day. And as little as it was, I needed the pay.About halfway through my sentence, I had the chance to apply to the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), one of the most renowned and rigorous college-in-prison programs in the US. The opportunity changed the trajectory of my life. Graduating from Bard College with my bachelor’s degree gave me something that no one could take away: an education. It was a hard-won prize, especially given the system’s intent to let me languish.Sitting in those classrooms better prepared me for work outside. Engaging with other students prepared me to later engage with co-workers; interacting with professors prepared me to deal with supervisors. Alongside classes in philosophy, political economy and differential equations, I was learning valuable social and professional skills that were radically at odds with the reality of prison.It costs New York around $70,000 a year in taxpayer money to imprison someone. It costs the BPI about $10,000 a year to educate an incarcerated student. New York’s recidivism rate is 40%, while graduates of the BPI and similar programs recidivate at only 4%, a tenfold decrease. Yet, despite its clear positive record, only 300 of New York’s 30,000 incarcerated people are enrolled at the BPI in any given semester. I was one of a lucky few.Prisons are designed to warehouse, traumatize and exploit people, then send them back home in worse shape than when they entered the system. Despite having worked every day, the vast majority of people are released with no job experience, no references and no hope. Some would take this to mean that the system is failing. And it is with regard to public safety, rehabilitation and justice, but it’s horrifyingly successful at two things: guaranteeing jobs for some and perpetuating slavery for others.Over the years, I learned that prison officials were not interested in giving us fruitful educational and job opportunities that allowed us to go home and stay home. The reality is much more sinister. Prisons are a job program for officers that requires us to keep coming back.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionYou may be familiar with company towns and coal towns; in the US, we have prison towns, too. In New York, all state prisons were built upstate as economic stimuli in rural districts and failing farm communities. The facilities imprison predominantly Black and brown inner-city residents who toil under a class of white overseers. I remember a guard bending over to shackle me one day and saying, “I just want to thank you for being here because I’m too old to be digging ditches.” My body and my labor made him an easy living. The parallels to slavery are stark and visceral.Prison officials ignore these critiques and justify their practices by pointing to the exception in the 13th amendment of the US constitution – negotiated as a concession to slave states – that allows slavery “as a punishment for crime”. This exception enables states like Texas to force incarcerated people, mostly Black men, to pick cotton – even at a net loss to the state, because cruelty is the point.Thankfully, a new abolition movement is working to end this exception, and I hope for its success. Over the past few years, seven states – from Tennessee and Alabama to Oregon and Vermont – have voted to end the exception in their state constitutions. And earlier this year, just ahead of Juneteenth, Senators Jeff Merkley and Cory Booker and Congresswoman Nikema Williams introduced the abolition amendment in Congress to end the exception in the US constitution and outlaw the enslavement of incarcerated people. Today it has bipartisan support.After 12 years, I was released with $40 and a bus ticket. The state did not even give me an ID. But I was one of the lucky ones who went home with a college degree. Without it, I would probably be back in prison today. I understand the value of giving incarcerated people real opportunities. Enslaving people is diametrically opposed to it. Nothing good can come from it.
Dyjuan Tatro is the senior government affairs officer at the Bard Prison Initiative, where he focuses on expanding college access for incarcerated people, and an #EndTheException ambassador More
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Struggling DeSantis and Pence attack criminal justice law they championed
by Evelyn Reynolds 23 July 2023, 10:00
As a Republican congressman, Ron DeSantis was a supporter of legislation that made moderate reforms to the federal prison system intended to reduce recidivism and mass incarceration – a cause that was also championed by then president Donald Trump and his deputy, Mike Pence.Five years later, DeSantis, now Florida’s governor, and Pence are struggling to overtake Trump’s lead among Republicans as they vie for the party’s presidential nomination, and have turned against the criminal justice measure they both supported in an effort to win over conservative voters.“Under the Trump administration, he enacted a bill, basically a jailbreak bill. It’s called the First Step Act. It has allowed dangerous people out of prison, who have now reoffended and really, really hurt a number of people,” DeSantis told the rightwing pundit Ben Shapiro in a May interview, vowing that “one of the things I want to do as president is go to Congress and seek the repeal of the First Step Act.”Pence echoed a similar message, telling the Washington Examiner that as president he would “take a step back from” the law.Their comments were the latest instances of Republicans wooing voters with promises to crack down on crime, a time-tested tactic for the GOP that last year helped the party win back control of the House.But conservatives who supported the First Step Act in 2018 say there’s no reason to repeal it, nor do they believe attacking it will help Pence and DeSantis overtake Trump’s substantial popularity advantage among Republican voters.“You’re in a political, what I call, silly season of you say a lot of things, and crime is a concern, public safety is a concern across the country,” said Doug Collins, a former Republican congressman from Georgia who introduced an early version of the act.He said the law was “not an issue until it was brought up, and it’s not an issue that seems to be gaining a lot of traction out there, especially when the facts of the bill were put out there for Republican voters.”One of the biggest pieces of criminal justice reform legislation Congress has passed in years, the First Step Act reduced mandatory minimum sentences for some drug-related crimes, created new rehabilitation programs for released inmates, banned the shackling of pregnant women and expanded time-served credit for most federal prisoners.Only a minority of America’s prison population, the largest in the world, is incarcerated in the federal system, but one of the act’s chief goals was to create programs that helped people released under the act keep out of prison for good.According to justice department data, the recidivism rate for those released under the law is just over 12%, as compared to the 45% rate the Government Accountability Office says is the baseline for federal prisoners overall.“When we see policymakers talking about the First Step Act, and trying to make some sort of misguided connection with crime, we have to be really realistic that the research and the evidence doesn’t point that way,” said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive non-profit.The act’s passage represented one of the few instances in which Trump and his Republican allies in Congress joined together with Democrats, and their legislative push was endorsed by outside groups as diverse as the American Civil Liberties Union and the conservative benefactors Koch Industries.The version of the act Collins introduced mostly dealt with ways to reduce recidivism, and DeSantis voted for the bill before resigning later in 2018 to mount his successful campaign for Florida governor. The Senate then added provisions dealing with sentencing reform, and as he signed it, Trump said the legislation “brings much-needed hope to many families during the holiday season”.Two years later, Covid-19 broke out and crime spiked nationwide, a phenomenon that appears to be relaxing but which has had an enduring impact on American politics. The former president currently leads the polls among Republican presidential candidates, but doesn’t say much about the First Step Act, having now shifted his demands to calling for Congress to slash the FBI and justice department’s funding over their investigations against him.DeSantis, meanwhile, has made an about-face on criminal justice policy since announcing his presidential run in May. While he signed a major criminal justice reform bill in 2019, he last month vetoed two measures dealing with expungements and probation violations, despite them passing with overwhelming support in Florida’s GOP-dominated legislature.Writing in RealClearPolitics, Steve Cortes, a spokesman for the DeSantis-aligned Never Back Down Pac, said that as a congressman, the governor only supported the initial “law-and-order version” of the First Step Act, and not the one that Trump enacted.“This obfuscation on Trump’s jailbreak points to an even more serious problem for the 45th president as he seeks re-election: he remains unable or unwilling to admit policy mistakes and to propose appropriate reversals or reforms,” Cortes wrote.Arthur Rizer, a conservative advocate for the act who co-founded ARrow Center for Justice Reform, remembers DeSantis as a supporter of the law during his time in Congress. Pence, meanwhile, at one point went to the Capitol to personally negotiate with GOP senators on getting the bill passed.The former vice-president is currently polling in the single digits among Republican candidates, while DeSantis is in a distant second place to Trump.“I think that they sense that there is a potential to create another wedge issue. And they are taking this opportunity to distinguish themselves from Trump. They can’t go out for Trump for the indictment stuff, so they’re looking for ways to pick at him,” Rizer said of the attacks on the First Step Act.“It actually breaks my heart to see people turning on something that’s done a lot of good for people who were in prison for relatively minor stuff. And now that they’re out with their families, and we’re using it as a political football, to score points and to dunk on the other side.” More
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Could California be the latest state to restore voting rights to felons?
by Evelyn Reynolds 17 February 2023, 10:00
Could California be the latest state to restore voting rights to felons?Proposal would allow prisoners to vote in what advocates see as a matter of racial justice – but challenges lie ahead Before having his sentence commuted by Governor Gavin Newsom last year, Thanh Tran served ten and a half years in prisons and jails across California, a time he described as the “most traumatizing and dehumanizing experience of my life”.Had he been able to vote during that time, he said he would have maintained some hope that his community still cared about him.“The focus of incarceration right now in California is about punishment, but if I had the ability to vote, it would still create that tie to the community,” said Tran, now a policy associate with the Oakland-based Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. It would be like the community saying, “Thanh, we still care about you out here,” he said. “We know your sentence will one day end and we want you to return home and be a good neighbor to us.”The untold story of how a US woman was sentenced to six years for votingRead moreNow Tran is a leading supporter of ACA 4, a constitutional amendment introduced last week by California assemblymember Isaac Bryan that would restore voting rights to California’s prisoners – a population that is disproportionately non-white.California is one of at least three states where lawmakers this year have introduced proposals to allow citizens to vote while serving time for felonies in state and federal prison. Democratic lawmakers in Massachusetts and New York have also filed bills and amendments to end felony disenfranchisement.If any of the proposals succeed, the states would join Maine, Vermont and Washington DC in allowing people to vote while incarcerated. Along with the states restoring rights to people with felony convictions upon release from prison, this marks a time when states are slowly erasing Jim Crow-era laws that have prevented people with felony convictions from ever fully regaining their rights.But advocates still face steep challenges.While Washington DC successfully ended felony disenfranchisement in July 2020 when the city council passed a bill unanimously, the efforts this year will face uphill battles, and other states that have attempted to do the same in recent years have run into roadblocks. In Oregon, a legislative attempt stalled in early 2022, despite strong support from Democratic lawmakers. And legislation proposed in Illinois also stalled in committee. Similar unsuccessful bills have also been introduced in Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Mexico and Virginia.Across the country, an estimated 4.6 million Americans are barred from voting due to a felony conviction, according to the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group focused on decarceration. The rate at which African Americans are disenfranchised currently is 3.5 times higher than non-African Americans.When Bryan, who chairs the California assembly’s election committee and has a background in criminal justice advocacy, was elected to represent a portion of Los Angeles in the legislature, he started thinking about how policy could better connect incarcerated people with their communities. He said he realized that cutting people off from society by revoking their right to vote doesn’t benefit anyone. “People touch the criminal legal system because they felt disconnected from society,” he said. “Disconnecting them further doesn’t make any of us safer.”“Overall democracy thrives when everyone is included, and that includes people who are currently incarcerated,” he added.Of the more than 95,000 people in the California state prison system, 80% are people of color or people from poor and disadvantaged communities, according to Antoinette Ratcliffe, executive director of California-based non-profit Initiate Justice.‘Stakes are monstrous’: Wisconsin judicial race is 2023’s key electionRead moreFor that reason, Bryan, who represents part of Los Angeles, says ending California’s practice is a matter of racial justice. “We know that our criminal legal system is full of bias and we know that it disproportionately exacerbates the negative conditions of life for Black, brown, poor, indigenous communities.”Bryan noted that the vast majority of California’s prisoners will return home, and allowing them to maintain a connection to their communities lowers recidivism rates and helps their potential for success.To become law, the constitutional amendment would need to pass with a two-thirds vote in both chambers of the legislature and then be approved by a majority of voters on the ballot.If passed, incarcerated people would cast ballots at their last place of residence before being incarcerated. California has eliminated prison gerrymandering, meaning people are counted for purposes of reapportionment where they last resided instead of at their prison location – a practice that can be manipulated to give people living in localities with prisons disproportionate representation.Bryan also pointed out that California currently allows people serving time in jail for offenses other than felonies to vote inside the jail, so “questions about whether you can facilitate an election in a carceral setting have already been answered through that process”.Assemblymember Tom Lackey, a Republican who serves as vice-chair of the election committee, shared his opposition to the proposal, tweeting: “Criminal acts should have consequences. Voting is a sacred privilege, not an absolute right of citizenship.”California’s proposal comes at a time when other states are also considering expanding their electorate to include more people with felony convictions. The number of people disenfranchised due to felony convictions nationally has declined by 24% since 2016, according to the Sentencing Project, as states have changed their policies and state prison populations have declined modestly.A number of states have taken measures in recent years to extend voting rights to people on probation and parole, including California, where voters approved Proposition 17 in 2020, allowing people on parole to vote. California is now one of 21 states where people lose their right to vote while incarcerated but regain the right upon release.Rightwing group pours millions in ‘dark money’ into US voter suppression bidRead moreThis year, the Democratic-controlled Minnesota house of representatives passed a bill that would restore voting rights to individuals on parole, probation or community release, and now the bill heads to the state senate, which is also controlled by Democrats. In Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, Texas and Virginia, lawmakers have also proposed bills to ease restrictions on voting rights for people with felony convictions.Progress has been stymied in other states, including North Carolina, which restored voting rights to roughly 56,000 people on parole and probation before the 2022 election. But the now Republican-controlled state supreme court heard a challenge to the law in early February and appears poised to roll back that expansion.Bryan said he hopes his proposed constitutional amendment will get more states thinking about restoring voting rights to everyone.“As we lead in California, a lot of the rest of the country follows,” Bryan said. “I think that’s a good thing and it’s an opportunity to show what change can look like and what progress can look like.”TopicsCaliforniaThe fight for democracyUS prisonsVotes for prisonersUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More
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The untold story of how a US woman was sentenced to six years for voting
by Evelyn Reynolds 27 December 2022, 06:00
The untold story of how a US woman was sentenced to six years for voting The case of Pamela Moses sparked a national outcry – but newly uncovered documents reveal the extent of its injusticeIt was the morning after Labor Day and Pamela Moses was in a rush.All summer, the outspoken activist had been feuding with election officials in Memphis, Tennessee. She wanted to get her name on the ballot for Memphis’s 2019 mayoral election, even gathering enough signatures to do so. But officials said she could not run – a prior felony conviction made her ineligible to seek office.Now, there was a new problem. In late August, the local elections commission sent her a letter saying they were going to cancel her voter registration. Moses was confused – she had been voting for years. That day, she was determined to sort it out.But what unfolded over just a few hours that day on 3 September 2019 would upend her life. It would lead to a sudden arrest months later at O’Hare airport in Chicago and culminate in a six-year prison sentence for voter fraud.Her case would go on to touch a nerve in the US and cause a national outcry. While there’s no comprehensive data on voter fraud prosecutions based on race, it was one of several recent examples in which Black defendants like Moses have faced long criminal sentences for voting errors, while white people have faced little punishment for more fraud. Long after the abolition of poll taxes and literacy tests, Black Americans still face significant scrutiny for trying to exercise their right to vote.What I learned from my interview with Pamela Moses, imprisoned for a voting errorRead moreTo make matters worse there is a byzantine bureaucracy in Tennessee and other US states, which can make it nearly impossible for people with felony convictions to vote again. The system has allowed officials to block people from voting for owing small sums of money and prosecutors to bring charges against others who make good-faith mistakes about their voting eligibility.But at the center of the Moses case was a relatively simple question: should someone who makes a voting mistake face serious criminal charges?Nearly everyone in Memphis seems to know Moses, 45, or has heard of her.She’s a self-taught student of the law – the librarians in the county law library know her by name – and has sued many of the top officials in Memphis, frequently representing herself in court. She’s appeared in local papers over the years. She’s had disagreements with other local activists and founded her own non-profit.“If she sees something that she feels is unjust, she’s going to say something about it,” said Dawn Harrington, who has been friends with Moses for over two decades and is the executive director of Free Hearts, a criminal justice non-profit. “She’s not going to be afraid of the backlash that might happen.”“She’ll always take you to the limit,” said Michael Working, a criminal defense attorney in Memphis who has represented Moses and known her for a decade. “She’s willing very often to be publicly flogged by the government on principle.”In person, Moses is at times mercurial, but often charming. She can rattle off the history of Memphis neighborhoods, the names of local judges, lawyers and statutes that she’s researched, sprinkling in bits of hip-hop history (she also writes and produces her own music). She is fiercely protective of Taj, her teenage son.Few officials attracted Moses’s ire as much as Amy Weirich, a Republican who served as the district attorney in Shelby county, which includes Memphis. Several years ago, Moses made local headlines when Weirich prosecuted her for stalking and harassing a local judge, tampering with evidence and forgery.In 2015, Moses pled guilty to those charges and was sentenced to several years of probation. Years later, she would say that pleading guilty and not fighting the case “was the worst mistake of my life”. She believed she was innocent, but the conviction led people to think she was guilty.Harrington, her longtime friend, said that the case cemented her status as someone who was disliked by people in high office in Memphis. “She had been on the bad side of the powers that be there,” she said.When Moses pled guilty, there was a hearing in which a judge questioned her and made sure she understood the consequences of her decision. But there was one ramification that neither the judge nor any of the lawyers present brought up: Moses would lose the right to vote for life.To understand Moses’s case, one needs to know that America has long stripped people convicted of felonies of the vote.After constitutional amendments in the 19th century expanded the franchise to Black Americans, many states passed felon disenfranchisement laws as a way to continue to keep African Americans from the ballot box and therefore prevent them from wielding political power, said Christopher Uggen, a professor at the University of Minnesota who has studied the topic closely. He suggested the laws have persisted because people with criminal convictions are stigmatized, and so seeking redress for them is politically fraught.Today, the laws continue to heavily affect Black Americans – 5.3% of the adult Black population is disenfranchised because of a felony, compared to 1.5% of the non-Black adult population. Overall, an estimated 4.6 million people can’t vote because of a felony conviction in the US.Bar chart comparing felony voting disenfranchisement of Black Americans to all AmericansMoses’s home state of Tennessee strips any person convicted of a felony of the right to vote. Nearly 472,000 people of voting age can’t vote in Tennessee because of a felony conviction, the vast majority of whom have completed their sentence, according to the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit. It’s estimated that more than one in five Black people of voting age in the state can’t vote because of a felony.In Tennessee, it is also extremely difficult for these people to get their voting rights back once they complete their sentences. There are three different sets of rules, depending on when the person was convicted. A request to even just fill out the state’s required application for the restoration of voting rights can be rejected for any reason – without explanation.Tennessee’s confusing system isn’t unusual. Many US states, particularly in the south, require anyone with a felony conviction to go through a bureaucratic process if they want to vote again.In Mississippi, people with certain felony convictions have to petition the legislature to restore their voting rights individually – and hardly anyone makes it through.In Florida, voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment in 2018 to repeal the state’s lifetime voting ban for most people with felonies. But the Florida legislature quickly stepped in and passed a measure that said completing a sentence meant paying all outstanding fines and court fees, which put voting again out of reach for many. Even if people can afford to pay, it’s extremely difficult to figure out how much they owe since the state has no centralized way of keeping track.Bar chart of the five states with the highest estimated rates of Black felony voter disenfranchisementThat uncertainty is the point of these laws, said Nicole Porter, the senior director of advocacy at the Sentencing Project.“I think there is intentionality behind the complications,” she said. “It’s about chilling or minimizing participation in the electorate by certain constituencies. It’s the modern day manifestation of very hard policies that dominated the Jim Crow era.”This was the tangled web Moses stepped into just after Labor Day in 2019.Because she didn’t realize she had lost her voting rights, she had been voting regularly until the summer of 2019. When she was informed that her voter registration was about to be canceled, Moses called the elections commission and asked what to do. She said a staffer advised her to go through the restoration process. (The elections commission declined to say to the Guardian whether it had ever advised her to do so.)The next step Moses took was the one on which her conviction – and its reversal – rested.One of the people required to fill out the form for her voting rights restoration was a probation officer, who had to confirm that Moses’s criminal sentence had concluded. When Moses showed up at the probation office on 3 September, she met with the manager on duty, named Kristoffer Billington, who had worked for the probation office for five years. He had never filled out the form before, he would later testify in court.Moses told him her probation was finished, and he went to the back of the office to research her case. Billington called a colleague in a different office for help. They both looked at Moses’s file in the computer system.According to the information they saw, it looked like Moses had finished her probation in 2018. But there was a problem – Moses’s computer file still showed she was on unsupervised probation. Billington thought this was a bureaucratic error and believed someone had forgotten to close out her file.As he was examining the case, the receptionist repeatedly called Billington’s office to tell him Moses was growing impatient and wanted to turn in the form to the election office, he would later testify. After about an hour of research, he wrote on the form that Moses had completed her probation, signed it and returned it to her.Billington had made a mistake. Unbeknownst to him, there were more case files that showed Moses’s felony probation wouldn’t expire until the following year, 2020. In parallel, Moses had been fighting in court that summer to have a judge declare that her sentence was over because she wanted to run for mayor. In court filings, she argued that her probation had expired. But courts disagreed. Moses didn’t think those rulings were correct and thought Billington and the probation office would be able to give her a more definitive answer.It might seem hard to believe that there was a dispute about something as basic as when Moses’s sentence ended. But those kinds of ambiguities are actually quite common, Uggen said.“People who aren’t subject to supervision don’t really understand how fuzzy things like release and supervision dates are,” he said. “Anybody inside the system or across jurisdictions knows that what’s written on this piece of paper might be very different than that other piece of paper.”And these bureaucratic mistakes can land people in prison.Just 30 minutes after Moses left his office, Billington got a call from someone in the Tennessee attorney general’s office telling him he made a mistake on the form. And after Moses turned in the form, the elections office quickly caught the mistake too. A few days earlier, they had referred her to prosecutors for potential voter fraud, owing to the fact they had learned she had been regularly voting while on probation.“Isn’t whether or not she completed the required probationary period for the 2015 felonies the subject of the [ongoing court case],” Pablo Varela, an attorney for the elections commission, emailed Kirby May, a prosecutor in the district attorney’s office shortly after Moses turned in the form. “How can the Court Clerk issue this attached document stating she has been granted final release from incarceration or supervision?”‘It’s a scare tactic’: Pamela Moses, the Black woman jailed over voting error, speaks outRead moreMay responded later that afternoon and attached a copy of a July court order saying Moses was still on probation. She was still ineligible to vote, he said.Vicki Collins, a staffer at the elections commission, forwarded Moses’s application to the Tennessee secretary of state’s office to review. “The Shelby County Election Commission has been in an ongoing lawsuit with Ms. Moses. She has been denied the right to be on the ballot for Mayor because she is still on probation until 2020,” wrote Collins, who specialized in helping people with felony convictions get their voting rights back. A little over an hour later, a lawyer with the secretary of state’s office wrote back. She agreed Moses was ineligible to vote, but offered a new reason for why.In 2015, one of the crimes Moses pled guilty to was tampering with evidence, which causes a permanent loss of voting rights in Tennessee. All of the research Billington had done at the probation office was irrelevant. It didn’t matter whether she was on probation or not.The next morning, Collins, the elections staffer, appeared happy to learn Moses was permanently barred from voting. “LOOK AT HER STATUS!!! PERMANENTLY INELIGIBLE,” she wrote in an email, including a smiley face.The same day, the elections office also received a letter from the Tennessee department of corrections alerting them to Billington’s error. The letter didn’t say that Moses was to blame or that Billington was deceived.The elections office quickly wrote to Moses explaining she was permanently banned. “Absent a change in state law, future attempts to register to vote anywhere in Tennessee may be considered a class D felony,” read the letter from Linda Phillips, the election administrator in Shelby county.Later that evening, Phillips expressed concern that she hadn’t received a reply from Moses. “I am a bit concerned that Pamela Moses did not respond to my email telling her she would never be able to register to vote.” She hinted at concerns for her own safety over the issue, writing “I do have a concealed carry permit,” in an email to a member of the election commission.In a response to questions from the Guardian, Phillips said: “If incorrect information is provided to our office, intentionally or unintentionally, the state of Tennessee alerts us about the inaccuracies. That’s what happened in Ms Moses’s case.”She also defended the emails she and Collins sent after learning Moses was ineligible to vote.“Any email exchanges within [the elections commission] regarding announcements of Ms Moses’s ineligibility to vote should be perceived as urgent notice to ensure staff awareness, considering Ms Moses’s frequent and sometimes harassing visits to our offices,” she said.TimelineTimeline of Pamela Moses caseShowMarch 2014 After a felony conviction more than a decade earlier, Moses successfully has her right to vote restored.April 2015 Moses loses her voting rights again after she pleads guilty to several felonies, including tampering with evidence and perjury.July 2019 Moses is blocked from running for mayor of Memphis because of a prior felony conviction. A judge says she is still serving a probationary sentence from her 2015 conviction.August 2019 Shelby County Elections Commission tells Moses she is ineligible to vote and will be removed from voting rolls.September 2019 Probation office and local clerk fill out and approve a form saying Moses is eligible to vote. Election officials reject Moses’ request, telling her she is permanently banned from voting.November 2019 Moses is indicted for illegal registration and voting. She is arrested while traveling through customs at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. November 2021Moses is convicted of making false entries on an official registration or election document. January 2022 Moses is sentenced to six years in prison.February 2022 A judge orders a new trial for Moses, in part because of documents not turned over to her defense.April 2022 Prosecutors announce they are dropping charges against Moses.Two months later, prosecutors filed a 14-count indictment, charging Moses with illegally voting nearly a dozen times after her 2015 guilty plea. She was arrested at O’Hare airport while returning to the US from a trip abroad.Later, prosecutors offered her a deal, saying if she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge she would get six months of unsupervised probation and no additional prison time. She refused.“It was about the principle to me,” Moses said. “I hadn’t done anything wrong. All I did was try to get my right to vote back and you don’t like me,” she said. “I was okay with going to jail if people could understand what this is really about. I don’t regret making that decision.”Just before the trial began, prosecutors dropped 12 of the 14 charges, declining to prosecute her for illegally voting. There was no evidence that anyone had told Moses she was ineligible to vote, and the fact that the elections office had sent her voter information made it harder to prove she knew.The trial began on 3 November 2021 and lasted just two days. A single question remained: did Moses knowingly trick Billington to falsely say she was off probation when he filled out the form?May, the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case, zeroed in on the numerous times after 2015 that Moses had asked courts to declare she was off probation and judges had rejected her requests.“It’s like a child going up to both her parents, ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme’ … They make the mistake and give it, even though they’d told no, no, no. It’s the same thing, she knew what she was doing on September 3rd,” he said at the trial. “She was desperate to try to get her rights restored, she wanted to run for mayor, whatever, she was desperate. She didn’t care, she was going to try anyway. This was her last stitch [sic] effort.”When Billington testified, he owned up to his mistake. But May argued Moses had deceived him, even though she was not in the room when he did his research and signed off on the form. Billington said Moses had told him she was off probation when she walked into the office and was acting impatient as he researched her case.Ferguson, Moses’s lawyer, argued that the state was punishing Moses for its own mistake. “If they can’t get it right, we can’t convict her for not getting it right,” he said in his closing argument.Ultimately the jurors found Moses guilty. In late January, W Mark Ward, the judge overseeing the case, sentenced Moses to six years in prison. Weirich, the prosecutor, said Moses had brought a trial and any harsh punishment on herself by refusing to take the plea.“I gave her a chance to plead to a misdemeanor with no prison time. She requested a jury trial instead. She set this unfortunate result in motion and a jury of her peers heard the evidence and convicted her,” she said at the time.Local reporters had been following Moses’s case, but in early February, it started to receive national attention. The Guardian published a story highlighting Moses’s punishment. The next evening, Rachel Maddow did a segment on Moses’s case, comparing her six-year sentence to those of white Trump supporters who had received lesser sentences for intentional acts of voting fraud. The New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press, among other outlets, followed. Moses, detained in prison, didn’t know her case was getting more attention.Then, a few weeks later, new information came to light.Through a public records request, the Guardian obtained the result of an internal investigation from the Tennessee department of corrections looking into why Billington had signed off on Moses’s voting eligibility. The supervisors who had investigated squarely placed the blame on Billington for the error, undercutting the prosecution’s idea that Moses had deceived him into signing off on the form.Perhaps most significantly, Moses’s lawyers had never seen the document before – prosecutors hadn’t turned it over with all of the other evidence in the case. That lack of disclosure was potentially unconstitutional and entitled Moses to a new trial.The day after the Guardian published the document, Moses had a previously scheduled hearing to request a fresh trial. Judges rarely granted such requests – the hearing was supposed to be a formality on the way to an appeal. At any rate, that morning, Moses’s lawyer submitted the missing document to the court.Harsh punishments for Black Americans over voting errors spark outcry | The fight to voteRead moreRemarkably, Ward unexpectedly granted Moses’s request for a new trial. He said that the document should have been turned over to Moses’s lawyers before the initial trial and that he had erroneously allowed certain other evidence to be admitted. Moses, who had been in jail, broke down in tears in the courtroom.It wasn’t the first time Weirich’s office has come under fire for failing to disclose evidence to a defendant. A 2014 study by the Fair Punishment Project found her office ranked first in Tennessee in prosecutorial misconduct. Weirich sought to distance herself from the error. The department of corrections, not her office, was to blame for not turning over the missing document, she said.Two months later, Weirich announced she would drop all charges against Moses. “She has spent 82 days in custody on this case, which is sufficient,” she said in a statement, also noting Moses remained permanently barred from voting. “In the interest of judicial economy, we are dismissing her illegal registration case and her violation of probation.”Both Weirich and Ward would go on to lose their re-election bids in August.Moses’s case may have prompted a national outpouring of disapproval, but tendentious-seeming voter fraud charges have not disappeared.In August, for instance, Florida governor Ron DeSantis announced the state was prosecuting 19 people with prior criminal records for voter fraud. Many of the people charged said they were confused about their eligibility and that no one had told them they couldn’t vote.Crystal Mason, a Black woman in Texas, is still appealing a five-year prison sentence for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election while on supervised release for a federal felony. Mason has said she had no idea she was ineligible, and the ballot had even been rejected.Moses, as well as those who have followed her case, doubt that it will be one of the last.Both the Shelby county elections commission and the Tennessee department of corrections declined to say whether they had changed their processes for helping people determine their voting eligibility in the wake of Moses’s case. “Any changes in that process would be done at the state level,” Phillips said.One morning at the end of April, just after the charges were dropped against her, Moses held a press conference at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. She was there to speak publicly for the first time about Weirich’s decisions to drop the charges against her.“When it comes to Black people in the south, whatever we do, if it’s wrong, you’ve got to pay for it,” she said. “If there was a white person and I got treated the way I did, I would be just as upset. But you don’t see white people getting treated like that.”Since her case was dropped Moses has been working on an album and documentary, and she’s continued to push to be able to vote again.She’s still seeking a gubernatorial pardon from her 2015 conviction is suing Tennessee to try to get the state’s felon disenfranchisement law declared unconstitutional. She’s also suing local officials for damages in her voter fraud case. “I don’t know what the future holds, but I do know I will get to vote again,” she said.“I want people to take away that it’s not over just because Pamela is free,” said Dawn Harrington, Moses’s friend.” Because there are so many other Pamelas all across the state.”Brandon Dill contributed reporting from MemphisTopicsTennesseeThe fight for democracyLaw (US)US politicsUS prisonsUS voting rightsRaceMemphisfeaturesReuse this content More

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