Perspective: Even very short jail sentences drive people away from voting
By Ariel White Ariel White is an assistant professor of political science at M.I.T. March 28 at 11:45 AM The disenfranchisement of felons has been a hotly debated subject recently, partly because such states as Florida and Louisiana have recently made it easier for people with criminal convictions to vote after they finish their sentences.
The study focused on Harris County, Tex., which includes Houston, the state’s largest city. I tracked the cases of over 100,000 people charged with misdemeanors, which include offenses ranging from drug possession to theft to simple assaults, between 2008 and 2012. They faced jail sentences of up to a year but no loss of their voting rights. I then looked at whether these people voted in the 2012 presidential election.
But it was a hard proposition to test, for all sorts of reasons. In the population at large, people who are charged with misdemeanors and sentenced to jail, are different from those who don’t in many ways; they’re often younger, poorer and less likely to trust government to begin with. So we might look at their voting habits and conclude that we were identifying a “jail effect” but really just spotting those other differences.
The racial discrepancy in the findings was striking: White people sent to jail voted a bit less often, but black people turned fairly dramatically away from voting. Jail time reduced their voting participation rates from roughly 26 percent to 13 percent.
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