No Incarceration Without Representation

[from 1/13/10]

Friday the Thirteenth falls on Wednesday this month, and that says a lot about how I'm feeling about this column so far. I know; "so far" doesn't mean much to you, just one and a half sentences; but to me it means all the time I've sat here staring at this blank space.

Do I really want to talk about Jay Leno's move back to 11:35? I do feel the Nation's collective pain for Jay Leno, and pray that he can redeem himself, and return to his former glory. On the other hand, I never watched his show, so it's hard to talk about.

Or do I talk about the possibility that when the courts are done, Washington State felons might get to vote? Again, there's the same problem. I've never been a felon, so it's hard to talk about. Leno, felons, Leno, felons. I decide to go with the extra two letters.

Even though I've never been in prison I have strong feelings on the subject owing to this: The US has more people locked up in jails than any big totalitarian government you ever heard of. We shackle people faster than we can grow them. We lock people up for anything they do we don't like, as long as they aren't rich and don't do it for a corporation, in which case we give them money and beg them to stop. The inescapable conclusion is, as I'm not rich and prone to behave unpopularly, I could get locked up. It's not as likely as it would be if I were differently hued, but the odds are still uncomfortably high that this vengeance-driven country could turn on me, too.

Question for our state attorney general: What exactly are we preventing by keeping felons from voting? Would you please spell out the nightmare scenario? Is the Felon Party going to go from distant third party status to number one, take over the state legislature, and move the capital to Monroe? Are felons, roughly one percent of the adult population, going to vote as a bloc and in so doing undermine the influence of other solid voting blocs of the same size, ending the hope for Washington State's American Indian and Alaska Native demographic to achieve the political comeback of five centuries everyone now expects thanks to our understanding of the parable underlying the plot of Avatar and its significance as an indicator of the winds of change in American society?

Or are we afraid that politicians wouldn't be able to resist pandering to felons the same way they pander to the rest of us, leading them to change laws so as to favor the incarcerated? You know, the same way they pander to the homeless population, which already has the vote, technically. Or, you know, the way they pander to disabled people, who can vote, who are now on state GA-U, until the new budget zeros GA-U out.

Really, if politicians pandered to prisoners the way they've pandered to me, it would serve those criminals right.

I just now noticed a study that was reported two years ago in the New England Journal of Medicine that found that inmates released from Washington State prisons were 13 times as likely to die during their first two weeks out as others of the same ages, sex, and race.

It might be we could do more studies like that one, which followed up on 30,237 inmates released between 1999 and 2003 in this state, in order to figure out how that statistic comes about and what we might do to help these people survive and get back on their feet.

Or maybe we could just grant them the voices they have, and let them tell us, and while we're at it, let them vote on their vital interests, and move forward that way.

Think of it as a social experiment. If it goes wrong, we can always move to someplace like, I don't know, Georgia or Australia.