US prisons

On a Wednesday afternoon earlier this month, Tony Lewis Sr, a former Washington DC drug dealer in his 32nd year of a life sentence, didn’t imagine anything exciting was in the cards. Then a prison counselor at the correctional institute in Maryland told him his voter registration form had arrived.“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” he told his son, Tony Lewis Jr, via text message. “I feel pride today, I feel like a real man, a citizen of my community and city.”Lewis Sr’s joy stemmed from legislation passed by DC’s council in July, extending the right to vote to incarcerated residents for the first time, a right that only Maine and Vermont currently allow. The DC Board of Elections says it has sent registration applications to 2,400 people in prison since the law passed, allowing them to vote in November’s presidential election. That number is lower than the 4,500 DC residents who were believed to be incarcerated earlier this year, a discrepancy likely in part due to prisoners being released because of Covid-19.But pinpointing an exact number is also difficult for DC officials because, unlike states, the nation’s capital doesn’t have its own prison system, meaning its incarcerated residents are scattered in over 100 federal facilities across the country.“We have no information other than the information we’ve been provided,” said Alice Miller, the executive director of the DC Board of Elections. “This is [the number the Federal Bureau of Prisons] gave us. This is what they identified.”Despite these complications, advocates of voting rights for felons have hailed DC’s new legislation as hugely significant in the precedent it sets in reversing the suppression of votes of Black Americans like Lewis Sr, nationwide. US restrictions on voting rights for felons are among the world’s harshest, and many were created to disenfranchise Black Americans after they gained voting rights in the Jim Crow era.According to the Sentencing Project, an advocacy and research organization, Black American adults are over four times more likely to lose their voting rights than other Americans, and overall, 2.2 million Black Americans are banned from voting. More