On September 5, the Georgia Attorney General’s office announced that 61 activists opposing the construction of a multi-million dollar police training facility in Atlanta have been hit with racketeering charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).
Atlanta residents have been fighting the proposed construction of a massive police training facility to be built on part of the region’s largest urban forests since 2021. Protesters allege that the training facility, dubbed “Cop City”, would hone the repressive tactics of the US police force and that it would contribute to increased repression against social movements, Black and Brown communities, and the working class as a whole. A mass movement has emerged in the city utilizing a diverse array of tactics including marches, forest occupations, direct action, and arts and culture.
The Atlanta Police Foundation and the state apparatus of Georgia have been attempting to subdue this movement every step of the way. The defendant list itself is a record of months of legal repression against the Stop Cop City movement. 42 out of the 61 defendants were previously charged with domestic terrorism. Defendants also include three activists who were charged with money laundering as a result of running a bail fund for arrested activists, a legal observer who was put in jail for monitoring protests, and three activists who were arrested for handing out flyers with the name of a police officer connected to the police killing of fellow protester Tortuguita.
“These charges are yet another flimsy and desperate attempt by the state government to crush the movement against police terror in Atlanta,” Stop Cop City activist Mariah Parker told Peoples Dispatch. “It shows that they have learned nothing in the course of this struggle: each time they have tried to snuff us out, we have emerged stronger and more organized. This will be no different.”
While the charges were filed last week, the date listed on all indictments is May 25, 2020. This was the day that unarmed Black man George Floyd was murdered in broad daylight by police officer Derek Chauvin, a killing that ignited a summer of the largest anti-police brutality protests in the United States to date. Prosecutors are tracing the actions of anti-Cop City protesters, who they label as “militant anarchists,” to the 2020 anti-racist protests—despite the fact that the Stop Cop City movement began in 2021.
As the Atlanta Community Press Collective reported, “In previous bond hearings for Stop Cop City defendants, prosecutors with the Georgia Attorney General’s Office have tried to link the George Floyd Uprisings to the Stop Cop City movement.”
“The Cop City RICO indictments allege the date when George Floyd was murdered by the police as the start of the ‘racketeering enterprise,’” wrote Atlanta-based activist and founder of Community Movement Builders Kamau Franklin. “The day a movement to abolish the police took on new life is the day for them a criminal enterprise was born.”
“This is a further attempt to criminalize a movement against police violence,” Franklin told Peoples Dispatch. “There is no basis in law to bring these charges. It is simply a scare tactic by the State and city against organizers.”
“It’s very clear that all levels of government in Georgia are committed to the same project that birthed the cop city proposal—absolutely stamping out any sort of radical movement against police brutality and this racist system,” Monica Johnson, Stop Cop City activist and anti-police brutality organizer told Peoples Dispatch. “This repression is part of the legacy of COINTELPRO, of trying to sever the ties between the community and organizers so people can’t envision a different type of life, one where our needs are met and we are not terrorized by the police.”
The recent wave of coups in West Africa must be understood in the context of widespread discontent with the ruling elites and their collaboration with imperialism
On July 26, 2023, Niger’s presidential guard moved against the sitting president—Mohamed Bazoum—and conducteda coup d’état. A brief contest among the various armed forces in the country ended with all the branches agreeing to the removal of Bazoum and the creation of a military junta led by Presidential Guard Commander General Abdourahamane “Omar” Tchiani. This is the fourth country in the Sahel region of Africa to have experienced a coup—the other three being Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Mali. The new governmentannouncedthat it would stop allowing France to leech Niger’s uranium (one in three lightbulbs in France is powered by the uranium from the field in Arlit, northern Niger). Tchiani’s governmentrevokedall military cooperation with France, which means that the 1,500 French troops will need to start packing their bags (as they did in both Burkina Faso and Mali). Meanwhile, there has been no public statement about Airbase 201, the US facility in Agadez, a thousand kilometers from the country’s capital of Niamey. This is thelargest drone basein the world and key to US operations across the Sahel. US troops have been told to remain on the base for now and drone flights have been suspended. The coup is certainly against the French presence in Niger, but this anti-French sentiment has not enveloped the US military footprint in the country.
Interventions
Hours after the coup was stabilized, the main Western states—especially France and the United States—condemned the coup and asked for the reinstatement of Bazoum, who was immediately detained by the new government. But neither France nor the United States appeared to want to lead the response to the coup. Earlier this year, the French and US governments worried about an insurgency in northern Mozambique that impacted the assets of the Total-Exxon natural gas field off the coastline of Cabo Delgado. Rather than send in French and US troops, which would have polarized the population and increased anti-Western sentiment, the French and the United States made a deal for Rwanda to send its troops into Mozambique. Rwandan troops entered the northern province of Mozambique and shut down the insurgency. Both Western powers seem to favor a “Rwanda” type solution to the coup in Niger, but rather than have Rwanda enter Niger the hope was for ECOWAS—the Economic Community of West African States—to send in its force to restore Bazoum.
A day after the coup, ECOWAS condemned the coup. ECOWAS encompasses fifteen West African states, which in the past few years has suspended Burkina Faso and Mali from their ranks because of the coups in that country; Niger was also suspended from ECOWAS a few days after the coup. Formed in 1975 as an economic bloc, the grouping decided—despite no mandate in its original mission—to send in peacekeeping forces in 1990 into the heart of the Liberian Civil War. Since then, ECOWAS has sent its peacekeeping troops to several countries in the region, including Sierra Leone and Gambia. Not long after the coup in Niger, ECOWAS placed an embargo on the country that included suspending its right to basic commercial transactions with its neighbors, freezing Niger’s central bank assets that are held in regional banks, and stopping foreign aid (which comprises forty percent of Niger’s budget). The most striking statement was that ECOWAS would take “all measures necessary to restore constitutional order.” An August 6 deadline given by ECOWAS expired because the bloc could not agree to send troops across the border. ECOWAS asked for a “standby force” to be assembled and ready to invade Niger. Then, ECOWAS said it would meet on August 12 in Accra, Ghana, to go over its options. That meeting was canceled for “technical reasons.” Mass demonstrations in key ECOWAS countries—such as Nigeria and Senegal—against an ECOWAS military invasion of Niger have confounded their own politicians to support an intervention. It would be naïve to suggest that no intervention is possible. Events are moving very fast, and there is no reason to suspect that ECOWAS will not intervene before August ends.
Coups in the Sahel
When ECOWAS suggested the possibility of an intervention into Niger, the military governments in Burkina Faso and Mali said that this would be a “declaration of war” not only against Niger but also against their countries. On August 2, one of the key leaders of the Niger coup, General Salifou Mody traveled to Bamako (Mali) and Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) to discuss the situation in the region and to coordinate their response to the possibility of an ECOWAS—or Western—military intervention into Niger. Ten days later, General Moussa Salaou Barmou went to Conakry (Guinea) to seek that country’s support for Niger from the leader of the military government in that country, Mamadi Doumbouya. Suggestions have already been floated for Niger—one of the most important countries in the Sahel—to form part of the conversation of a federation that will include Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Mali. This would be a federation of countries that have had coups to overthrow what have been seen to be pro-Western governments that have not met the expectations of increasingly impoverished populations.
The story of the coup in Niger becomes partly the story of what the communist journalist Ruth First called “the contagion of the coup” in her remarkable book, The Barrel of the Gun: Political Power in Africa and the Coup d’états (1970). Over the course of the past thirty years, politics in the Sahel countries has seriously desiccated. Parties with a history in the national liberation movements, even the socialist movements (such as Bazoum’s party) have collapsed into being representatives of their elites, who are conduits of a Western agenda. The French-US-NATO war in Libya in 2011 allowed jihadis groups to pour out of Libya and flock into southern Algeria and into the Sahel (almost half of Mali is held by al-Qaeda-linked formations). The entry of these forces gave the local elites and the West the justification to further tighten limited trade union freedoms and to excise the left from the ranks of the established political parties. It is not as if the leaders of the mainline political parties are right-wing or center-right, but that whatever their orientation, they have no real independence from the will of Paris and Washington. They became—to use a word on the ground—“stooges” of the West.
Absent any reliable political instruments, the discarded rural and petty-bourgeois sections of the country turn to their children in the armed forces for leadership. People like Burkina Faso’s Captain Ibrahim Traoré (born 1988), who was raised in the rural province of Mouhoun, and Colonel Assimi Goïta (born 1988), who comes from the cattle market town and military redoubt of Kati, represent these broad class fractions perfectly. Their communities have been utterly left out of the hard austerity programs of the International Monetary Fund, of the theft of their resources by Western multinationals, and of the payments for Western military garrisons in the country. Discarded populations with no real political platform to speak for them, these communities have rallied behind their young men in the military. These are “Colonel’s Coups”—coups of ordinary people who have no other options—not “General’s Coups”—coups of the elites to stem the political advancement of the people. That is why the coup in Niger is being defended in mass rallies from Niamey to the small, remote towns that border Libya. When I traveled to these regions before the pandemic, it was clear that the anti-French sentiment found no channel of expression other than hope for a military coup that would bring in leaders such as Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, who had been assassinated in 1987. Captain Traoré, in fact, sports a red beret like Sankara, speaks with Sankara’s left-wing frankness, and even mimics Sankara’s diction. It would be a mistake to see these men as from the left since they are moved by anger at the failure of the elites and of Western policy. They do not come to power with a well-worked out agenda built from left political traditions.
The Niger military leaders have formed a twenty-one-person cabinet headed by Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine, a civilian who had been a finance minister in a previous government and worked at the African Development Bank in Chad. Military leaders are prominent in the cabinet. Whether the appointment of this civilian-led cabinet will divide the ranks of ECOWAS is to be seen. Certainly, Western imperialist forces—notably the United States with troops on the ground in Niger—would not like to see this torque of coups remain in place. Europe—through French leadership—had shifted the borders of their continent from north of the Mediterranean Sea to south of the Sahara Desert, suborning the Sahel states into a project known as G-5 Sahel. Now with anti-French governments in three of these states (Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger) and with the possibility of trouble in the two remaining states (Chad and Mauritania), Europe will have to retreat to its coastline. Sanctions to deplete the mass support of the new governments will increase, and the possibility of military intervention will hang over the region like a famished vulture.
On June 19, 1865, two months after the U.S. Civil War ended, Union Gen. Gordon Granger walked onto the balcony at Ashton Villa in Galveston, Texas, and announced to the people of the state that “all slaves are free.”
If Juneteenth meant anything, it meant at least that Joshua Houston and his family were free.
Joshua Houston and his family in October 1898.Courtesy of the Sam Houston Memorial Museum and Republic of Texas Presidential Library, Huntsville, Texas
But there was more too.
The promise of freedom meant that more work needed to be done. Families needed to be reunited. Land needed to be secured. Children needed to be educated.
Indeed, the radical promise of Juneteenth is embodied in the community activism of Joshua Houston and the educational career of his son Samuel Walker Houston.
The violent white reaction to Black political power
Within a year of Granger’s proclamation, Houston had established a blacksmith shop near the Huntsville town square and moved his family into a two-story house on the adjoining lot.
He helped found the Union Church, the first Black-owned institution in the city, as well as a freedmen’s school to begin educating African American children.
In 1878 and 1882, a Republican coalition of Black and white voters opposed to conservative Democratic rule elected Houston as the county’s first Black county commissioner, a powerful position in local governance.
Despite this dramatic turn of events, Houston’s political story was hardly unique.
In the two decades following emancipation, 52 Black men served in the state Legislature or the state’s constitutional conventions.
But that number had fallen to two by 1882.
Opposition to Black freedom had been a powerful force in the state’s political culture since emancipation.
In 1871, the violence continued when the white citizens of Huntsville stormed the county courthouse and aided the escape of three men who had lynched freedman Sam Jenkins.
In the early 1900s, changes in state election laws, including the introduction of the poll tax, effectively disenfranchised most Black voters and many poor whites as well. Voter participation dropped from roughly 85% at the high tide of Texas populism in 1896 to roughly 35% when the poll tax became effective in 1904.
As a result, Robert Lloyd Smith was the last Black legislator for nearly 70 years when he finished his term in 1897.
These changes enabled the election of Black officials such as Barbara Jordan, the first African American woman to serve in the Texas Senate.
Like father, like son
On an unknown date, a few years after Juneteenth, Joshua Houston’s son Samuel Walker Houston was born free in the bright light of Reconstruction.
Although he spent his adulthood in some of the darkest years of Jim Crow, he continued his father’s work as an educator and community leader. Following a short stint at Atlanta University in Georgia and Howard University in Washington, D.C., Samuel Walker Houston returned to Huntsville and founded a school in the nearby Galilee community.
Houston’s school was named for him and served as one of the first county training schools for African Americans in Texas. It enrolled students at every level, from first grade through high school, and provided a curriculum based on Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee model of vocational training.
Young women at Houston’s school received training in homemaking, sewing and cooking, while young men learned carpentry, woodworking and mathematics.
By 1922, enrollment at the school had grown to 400 students, and it was recognized by contemporaries as the leading school of East Texas. In the 1930s, Houston’s school was absorbed into Huntsville’s school district, and he became the director of Black education in the county.
This 1919 photograph shows officials laying the foundation for a new building at the Samuel Walker Houston Training School.Jackson Davis Collection of African American Educational Photographs, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library
Houston encouraged a practical education for Black Texans, but he also believed that young Texans of all races needed to learn an account of history that differed from the white supremacist narrative that dominated Southern history.
Toward this end, he joined with Joseph Clark and Ramsey Woods, two white professors who pioneered race relations courses at Sam Houston State Teachers College. Together, the group led the Texas Commission on Interracial Cooperation’s effort to evaluate Texas public school textbooks during the 1930s.
In an analysis of racial attitudes in state-endorsed textbooks, they found that 74% of books presented a racist view of the past and of Black Americans. Most excluded the scientific, literary and civic contributions of Black people, while mentioning their economic contributions only in the period of slavery before the Civil War.
Instead, the group argued, books designed for both Black and white Texans needed to take the “opportunity … to do simple justice” by including Black history and the “struggle for the exercise” of equal civil, political and legal rights.
White Texans refused to adopt a textbook in the 1930s that taught the fundamental equality of the races, or portrayed Reconstruction, as it is now widely understood, as a missed opportunity to establish a more just and egalitarian Texas.
But Houston and his white counterparts were motivated by the conviction that progress, both for African Americans and for Texas, required a more honest and progressive account of the state and its history.
The Juneteenth Parade in Huntsville, Texas, circa 1900.Sam Houston Memorial Museum and Republic of Texas Presidential Library, Huntsville, Texas.
An ongoing battle for equality
Today’s legislative efforts in Texas and elsewhere to restrict the teaching of systemic racism in public schools ignore the lessons and realities represented by Joshua and Samuel Walker Houston’s lives.
The argument used for supporting such restrictions is that “divisive concepts” like the history of racism may make some students feel uncomfortable or guilty.
In reality, the prohibition on teaching the darker chapters of our past creates a segregated history.
Instead, as Samuel Walker Houston recognized, young Texans must have a more honest account of the past and of one another to progress into a unified and egalitarian society.
Texas history is both the story of people who dedicated their lives to the work of advancing freedom and the story of powerful people and forces that stood against it.
One cannot be understood without the other.
Americans cannot appreciate the accomplishments of Joshua and Samuel Walker Houston without examining the vicious realities of Jim Crow society.
The lesson of their lives, and of the Juneteenth holiday, is that freedom is a precious thing that requires constant work to make real.
Two recent cases in the South have raised fears that journalists and activists who use their constitutional rights against police power will be targeted by the state. Worse, establishment media don’t seem terribly troubled by this.
In North Carolina, Matilda Bliss and Veronica Coit, two reporters from the progressive Asheville Blade, were convicted of “misdemeanor trespassing after being arrested while covering the clearing of a homeless encampment in a public park in 2021.” The judge in the case “said there was no evidence presented to the court that Bliss and Coit were journalists, and that he saw this as a ‘plain and simple trespassing case’” (VoA, 4/19/23).
They’re appealing the conviction (Carolina Public Press, 5/17/23; NC Newsline, 6/2/23), and they have a good bit of support. In April, Eileen O’Reilly, president of the National Press Club, and Gil Klein, president of the National Press Club Journalism Institute, denounced the reporters’ conviction, saying that they “were engaged in routine newsgathering, reporting on the clearing by local police of a homeless encampment” (PRNewswire, 4/20/23). Available evidence, they said, “shows Bliss and Coit did not endanger anyone or obstruct any police activity,” adding that they “were arrested while reporting on a matter of public importance in their community.”
Dozens of other press advocates, including the Committee to Protect Journalists (5/3/23), PEN America (4/25/23) and the Coalition for Women in Journalism (4/19/23), have blasted the convictions.
‘Anti-establishment views’
The house of two of the Atlanta defendants is “emblazoned with anti-police graffiti in an otherwise gentrified neighborhood” (AP, 5/31/23).
In Atlanta, the assault on protesters against “Cop City”—a planned project that would devastate scores of acres of forest land on the city’s south side for a massive military-style security training complex—amped up when Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Atlanta police “arrested three leaders of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which has bailed out [anti-Cop City] protesters and helped them find lawyers” (AP, 5/31/23).
The three were charged with money laundering and charity fraud. The “money laundering” consisted of transferring $48,000 from their group, the Network for Strong Communities, to the California-based Siskiyou Mutual Aid—and back again. The “fraud” amounted to the defendants reimbursing themselves for expenses like building materials, yard signs and gasoline. Deputy Attorney General John Fowler seemed to get closer to the actual reason for the prosecution when he said the defendants “harbor extremist anti-government and anti-establishment views” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 6/2/23).
When news broke about the arrests, Atlanta activist and journalist circles were abuzz with fears and questions (Atlanta Community Press Collective, 5/31/23). There must be more to the story, right? These people couldn’t simply be arrested for providing bail and legal support—that would be absurd. What next: arresting defense attorneys?
The judge in the case has shared such skepticism, freeing the three on bond despite pressure from the state attorney general not to, and expressing “concerns about their free speech rights and saying he did not find the prosecution’s case, at least for now, ‘real impressive’” (AP, 6/2/23).
Tensions around Cop City are already high. Its projected cost has doubled (Creative Loafing, 5/29/23), dozens of protesters have been hit with domestic terrorism charges (WAGA, 3/5/23) and an autopsy for an activist killed by police “shows their hands were raised when they were killed” (NPR, 3/11/23).
The recent arrests have only raised the temperature. Not long after the three activists were granted bail, the Atlanta City Council “voted 11–4 after a roughly 15-hour long meeting” to approve the project, “sparking cries of ‘Cop City will never be built!’ from the activists who packed City Hall to oppose the measure” (Axios, 6/6/23; Twitter, 6/6/23).
‘Is she real press?’
Slate (6/1/23): “The state’s intention to criminalize dissent could not have been clearer.”
The Atlanta arrests have received considerable press attention. Slate (6/1/23) and the Intercept (5/31/23) wrote pieces highlighting the severity of the charges. The Asheville case, despite considerable outcry from press advocates, hasn’t had much attention outside left-wing and local press, with the surprising exception of a report on Voice of America (4/19/23), a US government–owned network.
What neither of these cases has received is an outcry from major newspaper editorial boards or network news shows, calling attention to their violation of constitutional rights—although the Atlanta arrests did get a news story in the New York Times (6/2/23) that included condemnations from civil liberties groups. (MSNBC published an op-ed denouncing the arrests on its website—6/3/23.) At FAIR, I have rung the alarm that journalists for both mainstream and small outlets have faced arrests (3/16/21) and extreme police violence (9/3/21). These incidents are part of that trend.
In the Asheville instance, Judge James Calvin Hill was already hostile toward the reporters’ First Amendment claims, as he questioned whether they were actually journalists (Truthout, 6/1/23). “She says she’s press,” a police officer said in court of Coit, to which Hill responded: “Is she real press?”
The Asheville Blade is a small, scruffy left-wing outlet; are we to assume that courts will determine what constitutes a journalistic outlet based on budget, size of distribution, popularity and political orientation?
In the case of the Atlanta arrests, coverage often carried photos of the activists’ Eastside house, painted purple with anti-police signage and graffiti. This hippie vibe might not be the image Atlanta’s powerful business class wants to project as the commercial center of the South; the Atlanta Police Foundation includes support from some of the city’s top corporations (New Yorker, 8/3/23), including Coca-Cola, Delta, Home Depot—and Cox, the AtlantaJournal-Constitution‘s parent company.
The Journal-Constitution, the major local paper, has run pieces (5/8/21, 1/25/23, 3/8/23) in favor of Cop City and other aggressive anti-crime tactics. Its editorial board (8/21/21) declared, “There’s no time to waste in moving to replace the city’s current, dilapidated training grounds,” because “criminals will continue to ply their trade, exacting a cost in property, public fears and even lives.”
Needless to say, this is not the way the Asheville Blade writes about police issues. But that shouldn’t matter, because constitutional rights, by their definition, are not supposed to discriminate.
Concern for freedom—elsewhere
The New York Times‘ concern (6/5/23) for a persecuted journalist is not so rare—at least when the persecutors are official enemies.
We live in a media environment (FAIR.org, 10/23/20, 11/17/21, 3/25/22) where we must constantly endure think piece after think piece about whether conservative college students are safe from ridicule if they come out against nonbinary pronouns, or if a comedian has suffered a dip in popularity because their schtick is considered “unwoke.” Governments actually trying to imprison people for exercising their constitutional rights somehow don’t generate the same sense of alarm in establishment media.
Unless, of course, those governments are abroad, in official enemy nations. The New York Times (6/5/23) prominently reported a “rare victory for journalism amid a crackdown on the news media in Hong Kong” after a court “overturned the conviction of a prominent reporter who had produced a documentary that was critical of the police.” When Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested in Russia, this was naturally covered, not just by his own paper (3/31/23) but its rivals as well (New York Times, 5/23/23; Washington Post, 5/31/23).
If our media really cared about the future of free discourse in contemporary America, and the state of freedom of speech and association, Atlanta and Asheville would be the focus of the same sort of media attention.
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‘When I was told I could vote, it was an amazing feeling,’ Jessie Tate said. ‘It felt so good. They gave you an ‘I voted’ sticker, and I was walking around with that sticker on all day long’
by DaniRae Renno, Pennsylvania Capital-Star, May 28, 2023
After spending nine years behind bars on a felony charge, one thought was going through Jessie Tate’s mind: His life was over.
“One of the things I didn’t have coming out of prison was hope,” Tate said at a panel regarding incarcerated voters rights on Tuesday. “With no way to participate in civil duties or get a job, prisoners end up going back to what they know.”
Tate also thought that he couldn’t vote. For 18 years after his incarceration, he watched his neighbors, friends and family flock to the polls to exercise influence over the political landscape of their home.
In 2012, he discovered through a grassroots campaign by the Obama campaign that he actually could. Tate proudly cast his ballot for the first time since his incarceration in the 2012 presidential election.
“When I was told I could vote, it was an amazing feeling,” Tate said. “It felt so good. They gave you an ‘I voted’ sticker, and I was walking around with that sticker on all day long.”
Thousands of Pennsylvanians will spend Nov. 8 behind bars with no easy access to a ballot box. Thousands more will let the day pass by while falsely believing that they are disenfranchised, or stripped of the right to vote, just like Tate did.
Voter access for incarcerated and previously incarcerated individuals is a topic that’s gained momentum over the years.
Earlier this month, Reps. Rick Krajewski and Rep. Christopher Rabb, both Philadelphia Democrats, began seeking support for legislation that would require the Department of State to develop educational programming surrounding civic education and voting for people in prisons, encode prisoners’ right to absentee ballots and give felons the right to vote.
In county and state institutions, voting access and education varies
Incarcerated people who were convicted of any crime not considered a felony have the right to vote. But they, but incarcerated individuals don’t have access to voting machines because of strict security in county jails and state correctional institutions.
Nationally, two out of every three people in U.S. jails aren’t convicted yet and are being held awaiting trial, according to research by the Prison Policy Initiative, an organization that advocates for campaigns to improve the condition of incarcerated individuals.
While the numbers fluctuate, a portion of “innocent until proven guilty” Americans are denied easy access to the polls.
The state Department of Corrections has detailed information on how incarcerated individuals can vote — but many prisoners don’t have internet access.
“The DOC provides eligible inmates with the opportunity to vote via a mail-in ballot,” the agency’s spokesperson, Maria Bivens, told the Capital-Star. “Those ballots are received to the institutions as Business Transactional mail and are handled by the facility business office.”
Theoretically, prisoners could vote in-person, but that would require a polling machine inside of an institution. In Pa.’s severely understaffed county jails, the logistics of obtaining enough prison guards on election day could prove near-impossible for an already taxed prison system. It’s also impossible because of voter precincts.
“It’s not a horrible idea, it’s just not a practical idea. Everyone thinks of voting at national and state levels, not considering county and municipality levels,” Dauphin County Elections Director Jerry Feaser told the Capital-Star. “We don’t register inmates out of the prison address, therefore there could be multiple different ballot styles because they’re specific to a precinct.”
Dauphin County Prison sits in Swatara Township, 2nd precinct. Feaser said that in the latest election, he received mail-in ballots from York, Berks, Adams and Lancaster county. Providing ballot styles from different counties in one voting machine is simply not possible, Feaser said.
According to a study published in 2021 by the PENNfranchise Project, an organization that works to train returning citizens on civic engagement, only 52 out of 25,000 people incarcerated in Pa. county jails requested a mail-in ballot in 2020.
Rep. Rick Krajewski, D-Philadelphia, explains his proposal to expand voting rights for inmates at a panel with representatives from the PENNfranchise project and The Sentencing Project on Tuesday May, 23, 2023 (Capital-Star photo by DaniRae Renno).
Krajewski called the stat “embarrassing.”
“That’s a fraction of a percent that’s using their right to vote,” he told the Capital-Star. “There’s very little coordination [between the state and DOC] on this.”Bivens said that the Corrections Department is currently collaborating with the Department of State to develop a video to play on the inmate channel that would occasionally remind incarcerated people about their voting rights.
In September 2022, former Gov. Tom Wolf signed an executive order that created “Vote Registration Distribution Agencies,” of which the Corrections Department is now designated.
Since the order, registration forms are now available at Parole Field Offices, Community Corrections Centers and are available to reentrants, according to Bivens. She also noted that the Department of State provided signage for facilities to advertise registration forms.
“We as a department are doing our part to close the gap of 1.7 million unregistered voters and ensure our residents and reentrants know that they have the right to have their voices heard,” Bivens added.
The County View
The larger problem is county jails. The DOC does not operate or have authority over them, and there is no uniform system within the jails to provide voting information, although by law they are required to provide voting opportunities to eligible voters.
In Dauphin County, jail officials work to ensure mail-in voting information is provided early. It’s a policy they’ve had since 2020.
“Each year we provide them [inmates] with a memo and calendar stating when the last day to register to vote is, when the last day to apply for an absentee ballot is, and we provide them with all the necessary forms,” Feaser said. “We set earlier deadlines just to make sure that we get the bulk of them done in advance.”
Feaser provided a letter and documents that were sent to inmates ahead of the May primaries to the Capital-Star. Included were a list of candidates, voter registration in English and Spanish, an absentee ballot application and national voter registration for inmates who reside in another state. The package also included comprehensive details on which inmates were eligible to vote and key dates throughout the election process.
The final document informs prisoners that there is “personal delivery of items” between the jail and the elections officers to “reduce any chance of items being lost in the mail.”
It takes a high level of cooperation between the jail and the board of elections. Either Feaser or his deputy coordinates with a prison official that’s appointed by the warden. Feaser called it “a solid chain of custody.”
Official election mail is also prioritized by jail officials, since the actual absentee ballots go through the U.S. mail. The prison mail system understands that if mail has an official election mail insignia on it, it can be pushed through without the typical searches that other mail undergoes, Feaser said.
However, Dauphin County is just one of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties. The PENNfranchise Project included in their study an analysis of the 46 county jails across the state, classifying their overall election policies as either “detailed,” “vague” or “none.” Dauphin was included in the “vague” category, as were 12 others. Only seven counties were “detailed.”
Twenty-six counties had no written policy, although they still must, by law, provide voting information to inmates.
Even when election paperwork is provided, it’s not always used. Feaser said that in the most recent elections, Dauphin County only got 20 ballots from the county jail, and while many ballots are diverted to separate counties, it’s still an underwhelming number.
“Hope:” The motivating factor for inmates to vote
In institutions where there is education surrounding how to vote, why prisoners should vote is not often addressed.
“You have to explain to individuals why their votes are so important,” Tate said. “People think their vote isn’t going to make a difference, but if 10,000 people are thinking like that, that’s 10,000 people not voting for these elected officials making laws that affect minorities.”
According to research by the Sentencing Project, Black Americans comprise nearly half of all persons confined to prison in Pennsylvania. When prisoners vote, it makes candidates answer to a more diverse constituency, and not just legislative candidates, said Leigh Owens, the executive director of the PennFranchise Project, during a May 23 panel discussion at the state Capitol.
“People don’t know that judges and district attorneys get voted in and out as well,” Owens said.
Tate echoed his sentiment, noting that during his time in prison he was upset to discover that individuals were serving a lesser sentence for what he considered more egregious crimes and that judges whom he believed were biased could be voted out. Tate also noted racial disparities in prison.
“This goes back to prison gerrymandering, which disproportionately impacted Black and brown incarcerated people,” Krajewski said. “This could be a very powerful racial justice initiative.”
Voting can also help incarcerated individuals gain a sense of hope, which Tate said he had so little of stepping out of prison.
“For me, voting kind of restores some powers,” Tate said. “When you realize that you can look at voting records in the House or Senate and if you see something that gives minorities a disadvantage, we could vote them out.”
Inmates with a felony conviction cannot vote while incarcerated. The moment they leave prison, their voting rights come back, but that’s often unclear.
In Tate’s experience the option to register to vote was lost somewhere in paperwork and list of things to do. While he acknowledges that he can be blamed for not inquiring about his voting rights, Tate said starting the conversation while inmates are still incarcerated is vital.
“When individuals get out of jail, they have a laundry list of things to do, especially on parole,” Tate said. “If you start in prison and talk about voting rights, you’ll get individuals that come out with a different mindset and start voting.”
Included in Krajewski’s legislation is a proposal to codify the right of incarcerated individuals to vote by absentee ballot.
“The more we can point to the law and the foundation of our sentencing code to say this is a right that every incarcerated person deserves to have, the easier it is to defend it,” Krajewski said. “Then we have some defense in court when something like this will inevitably be challenged.”
The case for a constituency that includes felons
The second part of the proposal would allow all incarcerated individuals, including felons, to vote.
“I believe we’re in a moment in [Pennsylvania]. and in the country where we’re realizing that retribution is not always the best path to justice,” Krajewski said. “It’s compassionate rehabilitation, and what it means to enfranchise people and give them the ability to vote is part of that conversation.”
Krajewski said allowing felons to vote in the commonwealth would be a “home run,” but that he’s willing to engage in conversation on his plan.
“I want to work to make this a priority, whether it’s this session or the next,” he said. “It’s going to take some work to make this happen.”
There are few examples nationally of laws allowing all incarcerated individuals to vote —
Currently, only Maine, Vermont, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico allow felons to vote while they are serving their sentences. Since most convicted felons are housed in state correctional facilities, the process would be similar to what the Pennsylvania Corrections Department currently has in place for inmates.
Passing the bill will take hard work and time, with a slim majority favoring the Democrats in the house and many Republicans opposed.
Jason Gottesman, a spokesperson of state House Republicans, said that inmate voting access was “nowhere near” the top of a list of identified problems noted in a House Republican review of Pa.’s election laws.
“Pennsylvania’s House Democrats, who have also proposed paying incarcerated Pennsylvanians $21 per hour for prison work, continue to push an extreme agenda focused more on helping people incarcerated for breaking Pennsylvania’s laws than on people who want to have safe communities free of crime and violence” Gottesman said. “This House Democrat thought experiment is another extreme proposal that does nothing to help solve real problems being faced by law-abiding Pennsylvanians.”
If the bill makes it through the House, it would face a hurdle in the Republican-controlled state . Senate, but Krajewski is both hopeful and said he remains open to conversation.
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