In most states in America, anyone convicted of a felony loses the right to vote until their sentence plus parole or probation is complete. Voting rights may be permanently revoked in ten states (Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nevada, Tennessee, and Wyoming), even after someone has been released from prison and completed parole and probation—and while still requiring payment of taxes.
Eight states (Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, South Carolina, and South Dakota) restrict voting for anyone convicted of a misdemeanor.
Only two states, Maine and Vermont, allow voting from prison.
When Attorney General Eric Holder established the Federal Interagency Reentry Council in 2011, it seemed to signal that something big was happening. Representing twenty federal agencies, the re-entry council’s bullet-pointed mission was to “make communities safer by reducing recidivism and victimization, assist those who return from prison and jail in becoming productive citizens, and save taxpayer dollars by lowering the direct and collateral costs of incarceration.” Everything about this was what I, what all of us, had been waiting for—a clear direction to the agencies making policy and, we hoped, an opening of the door to change policy. The Obama administration was going to get it right, finally affecting mass incarceration in a major way.
But a year passed, and then another. I had dared to, once again, get all hopeful. I had, once again, underestimated the bureaucracy of government, all its traps and tricks.
At a Drug Policy Alliance conference, I met Daryl Atkinson, an attorney at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice and one of the nation’s leading advocates for restoring rights to those with a criminal record. As we got to talking, I expressed my disappointment with the federal re-entry council. Not long after our conversation, Daryl was honored by the White House as a prestigious Champion of Change. But rather than simply accepting the award and heading home to North Carolina, Daryl used the spotlight, conveying, Hey, this recognition is great, but one thing that would be impactful is for y’all to hear from a group of formerly incarcerated people on what things can be done to create real change. Remarkably, the Department of Justice listened.
Daryl assembled seven others from across the nation, people he said were strong thinkers and leaders: from northern California, Dorsey Nunn and his Legal Services for Prisoners with Children colleague Manuel La Fontaine; Reverend Kenneth Glasgow of the Ordinary People Society in Alabama; Glenn E. Martin of JustLeadership-USA in New York; Norris Henderson of Voice for the Ex-Offender from Louisiana; Reverend Vivian Nixon of College and Community Fellowship in New York; and me. I flew to Washington, D.C.—on my own dime. Once again, with hope.
Together, the eight of us walked into the Department of Justice with four demands: a federal Ban the Box, changes to public housing laws to not exclude those with criminal records, Pell Grants for prisoners wanting to pursue a college education, and use of the bully pulpit to express the evils of disenfranchisement.
As we spoke, the Department of Justice folks nodded and took notes, but I left Washington wondering if it was really a call to action or merely a meet-and-greet.
I was encouraged when Daryl let us know the DOJ requested that the eight of us return. We all dug into our own pockets for air and hotel fare for another two-hour meeting, where the DOJ referred to us as Subject Matter Experts. Reverend Glasgow dubbed us the “Super 8.”
We were asked to return a third time. But between our meetings, I wasn’t hearing about much that was actually happening, and I soon grew impatient. I felt like I was operating in dog years—there was so much to be done that I needed to achieve seven years of progress packed into every 365 days. But the government was operating at a sloth’s pace, especially to take commonsense action. Though it was a boon that the Federal Interagency Reentry Council existed, it needed to move beyond writing papers to implementing real changes.
We in the Super 8 took things to the next level and organized conferences in Atlanta, Oakland, and New York to get the DOJ staffers outside the Beltway and into highly affected communities. There, they spoke directly with those impacted by mass criminalization and saw firsthand how desperately change was needed. After a year, we noted a bit of movement in a couple of the areas where we’d demanded change. HUD publicly stated the importance of second chances—sure sounded good, but where was some actual policy change in housing? President Obama banned the box for job applications for federal agencies—a start, but what did this do for my community, for most communities, where there were few to no opportunities to work at a federal agency?
Perhaps the most notable thing that came from our Super 8 meetings was adherence to our recommendation that the Federal Interagency Reentry Council hire a formerly incarcerated person. Glenn Martin said it best: “Those closest to the problem are closest to the solution—but furthest from resources and power.” The time had come; we wanted a seat at the table. In 2015, Daryl Atkinson was named the first ever Department of Justice Second-Chance Fellow.
“I’ve been an insurgent my whole career,” he said when I called to congratulate him. “So this will be like putting on a new skin.” I knew Daryl was the perfect person to walk in there. If anyone could bring about some change, he could.
Daryl himself was formerly incarcerated, having pled guilty in 1996 to a first-time, nonviolent drug offense, for which he served forty months in prison. After his release, he completed college and then took a faith walk, enrolling in law school. He hadn’t known a single attorney with a criminal record, but he fought the system and, like Vonya, eventually earned the right to practice. “Make them tell you no,” Daryl went on to advise others with a criminal record who dared to have big dreams. “We have to be willing to press up against these artificial barriers, otherwise you never make a demand on the system.”
Now it was his turn to do just that, on the country’s highest platform. After several months of his fellowship, I asked him about the progress he was seeing. He took a breath. “There’s a competing tension,” he described. “On one hand, you’re close to the levels of power, the levels that can have the most and broadest impact. But, at the same time, it’s at this level where the imagination of what’s possible seems the smallest.”