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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Unalienable Rights...Except if You’re a Felon
Tuesday 23 December @ 20:23:07 |
 by DAVID RUBENSTEIN
Why are some conservative Republicans so obsessed with increasing the length of prison sentences? Here’s one reason: High incarceration rates help Republicans win elections.
First some facts.
Incarceration rates in the United States are already the highest in the world, higher than Russia, Libya or Iran. They are five times higher than the United Kingdom, which has the highest rate in the European Union.
Another fact: A national campaign to make them even higher began with a Minnesota connection: an attack by House Judiciary Committee Republicans on James M. Rosenbaum, chief judge of the U.S. district court in Minnesota.
 Rosenbaum is a Reagan appointee with a reputation as a tough sentencer. Nonetheless about a year and a half ago, when he went to Washington to testify before a House Judiciary subcommittee, he didn’t tell Republicans on the committee what they wanted to hear.
At issue was some proposed legislation that would have resulted in harsher sentences for low-level drug dealers. Rosenbaum opposed it, telling the committee that it “confuses office boys and assembly-line workers with chairmen of the board.”
Republicans on the committee went after him with a vengeance. They said he lied to the committee, and they accused him of not adhering to sentencing guidelines at home. They arranged to have a clerk dispatched to Minnesota to inspect three years of his sentencing records, and they hinted they might try to impeach him. They got so nasty that even Chief Justice William Renquist, in an almost unheard of scenario, made a public statement in Rosenbaum’s defense.
The background to this flap is quite an eye-opener. It turns out the attack on Rosenbaum was spearheaded by two powerful Republicans who helped midwife the party’s late 1990s rebirth as “the party that can’t take no for an answer.” They are House Judiciary Committee chairman F. James Sensenbrenner and a relatively obscure subcommittee staff attorney named Jay Apperson. Both were key figures in the campaign to nullify the presidential election of 1996 by tying up Clinton in a three-year soap opera/impeachment campaign.
Sensenbrenner is the heir to a Wisconsin paper industry fortune and representative in Congress for some solid-Republican suburbs outside of Milwaukee. He’s been a congressman since 1978, but few outside of Wisconsin had heard of him until he delivered the televised speech that made the House case for Clinton’s impeachment in 1999.
Apperson, despite his current humble job title, is if anything more of a political heavyweight then Sensenbrenner. He was deputy to Ken Starr during the Clinton investigation and was reported to be on the short list to replace Starr when Starr finally resigned. A former assistant U.S. attorney in Virginia, Apperson is still remembered by some in that state for the confederate paraphernalia that adorned his office. People familiar with the workings of Congress say it’s almost unheard of for a committee chair to hire subcommittee staff counsel, but that’s how it worked in his case: Sensenbrenner personally brought him on as a Judiciary subcommittee staff attorney in 2001.
Apperson also helped write the so-called Feeney amendment, named for another House Judiciary Committee Republican, Tom Feeney from Texas. The Feeney amendment was shoe-horned into the Amber Alert bill, which was pushed in the House by Lamar Smith, another Judiciary Committee Texan who’s been on Rosenbaum’s case. The Amber Alert bill deals with kidnapping and abuse of children, but thanks to the Feeney amendment it also effectively increases the length of sentences for all federal crimes. (Many Democrats and some Republicans were appalled by the Feeney amendment but were afraid to vote against the Amber Alert bill because to do so meant people like Rush Limbaugh and his local AM radio clones might say you were soft on perverts.)
 Opposing “lenient” sentencing was also a goal of the House Working Group On Judicial Accountability, formed this summer by House Republicans which included, once again, Lamar Smith of the Judiciary Committee, as well as Tom DeLay, the Speaker of the House. DeLay is the former Houston pesticide applicator who is probably the most vicious and strategically-minded Republican street fighter in Congress. It was DeLay who proclaimed at the Working Group’s debut press conference that it would “take no prisoners.”
Attorney General John Ashcroft then weighed in, ordering federal attorneys nationwide to report judges who don’t give out sufficiently tough sentences, a directive that Senator Edward M. Kennedy characterized as “the establishment of a blacklist.”
Finally, in September, Ashcroft ordered prosecutors to curtail plea bargaining and “pursue the most serious, readily provable offenses that are supported by the facts.”
It all adds up to a full-blown campaign to keep more people in prison longer, and that raises another interesting fact: U.S. incarceration rates have gone from being a social and demographic trend to being an important factor in elections.
The Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit (basing its numbers on work co-written by University of Minnesota sociologist Christopher Uggen), notes that in the seven states that deny the vote to ex-felons, one in four black men is permanently disenfranchised. In Florida, at the time of the 2000 presidential election, there were an estimated 600,000 ex-felons who could not vote.
Uggen, reached independently, confirms these estimates. The Florida number is based on an analysis of releases since 1948, combined with life expectancy tables adjusted for recidivism and mortality, and he says it’s not far from the state of Florida’s own estimates.
Giving due deference to the power of both the religious right and the racist goon mentality in prisons, it’s safe to say that among the votes lost by the disenfranchisement of ex-felons, a solid majority percent would go against Republicans. Uggen, based on his studies, estimates it would be 7 out of 10.
Uggen also concludes the actual voting rate probably would be quite low in the ex-felon population — somewhere between 14 and 20 percent, depending on the election. However the actual number of lost votes nationally is still a very big number, big enough according to Uggen to have altered the results of at least six Senate elections in 2000, as well as the presidential election.
Although strategically-minded Republicans are surely aware of this phenomenon, you don’t have to posit another “vast right-wing conspiracy” at work here.
Confluence of interests is probably a better term.
Begin with a political agenda that knocks the bottom out of the economy, cripples unions and does everything in its power to emasculate labor as an interest group. Engineer a war on drugs that doesn’t stop drug use but does create a healthy market and a viable alternative to minimum-wage slavery. Then ratchet up drug penalties and push a legal system that takes away the right to vote, preferably for good.
The reality is that the U.S. incarceration rate is almost as much of a boon to Republican interests as the “the immigration problem.” Some problem: An entire class of laborers fill the lowest-paying and most dangerous jobs this economy provides, and not only can’t they vote, in most cases they can’t even file a complaint.
It’s true that some conservatives say they want to crack down on illegal workers. But the Republican party’s more sophisticated business constituency understands that having a big pool of undocumented labor is the second best thing to moving your business offshore, and it’s the best thing going for businesses like restaurants and construction that can’t be moved offshore. The more savvy Republican strategists also understand how beneficial it is to have a big chunk of the labor force shut out of any political give-and-take about regulations and wages. Not only are undocumented workers taxed, and often maimed and poisoned, without representation, their existence effectively weakens the bargaining power and political clout of “legitimate” labor that does have some representation.
The Pew Hispanic Center, part of the University of California Annenberg School for Communication, estimates there are more than 5 million undocumented workers in the United States. That includes about 600,000 in construction, 700,000 in restaurants, and more than 1 million in agriculture.
 The Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch estimates there are 3.9 million Americans who can’t vote because of a felony conviction. That includes 1.4 million who have completed their sentences. (That estimate was made in 1998, and there’s no reason to believe the numbers are not bigger today, and rising.)
Together these two demographic developments have changed the face of U.S. politics. The “stolen” 2000 presidential election, as we have come to understand it, was actually a desperate and clumsy mopping-up operation. The real theft took place quietly over a period of years and continues as we speak, largely invisible and virtually unacknowledged by mainstream media.
David Rubenstein covered the Judge Rosenbaum affair and related sentencing issues for Minnesota Law & Politics and The Nation.
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