Reconstructing Citizenship

Authors

Jenny E. Carroll, Texas A&M University School of LawFollow
James Jeter

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-2024

Journal Title

Virginia Law Review Online

Abstract

In our republican democracy, voting is a central right of citizenship. Yet millions of voters are routinely disenfranchised as a result of convictions or because their carceral status creates barriers to voting. In the past decade, academic scholarship has focused on the impact of disenfranchisement based on conviction. This work has mapped the legal and social implications of policies that deny voting rights to over five million otherwise eligible voters nationwide. Yet this work has some gaps. First, by focusing solely on conviction-based disenfranchisement, the existing scholarship has largely ignored fatal barriers to voting created (and at times perpetuated) by incarceration alone. Second, the lived experiences of those denied the right to vote are notably absent from the literature. This paper seeks to re-center the conversation about the right to vote in the lives of those impacted by the policies that restrict the franchise.

To do so, this paper uses the participatory law scholarship (“PLS”) methodology to draw heavily from the shared experiences of the coauthors, who collaborated in 2022 on an unsuccessful attempt to overturn Connecticut’s felon disenfranchisement law and open pathways to voting for incarcerated people. Specifically, this paper lays out the historical and theoretical bases that inform policies of conviction- or incarceration-based disenfranchisement. It then turns to two critical and novel claims. First, it challenges the bases and scope of such policies, noting their broad impact. Second, it grounds the story of conviction- or incarceration-based disenfranchisement in the lives of affected individuals and their communities. This second point is critical; we seek to marry the lived experience of a co-author, James Jeter, with the academic treatment of that experience.

Vital claims emerge from James’s firsthand narrative. First, disenfranchisement creates a ripple effect that moves through communities, impacting not only the incarcerated and convicted person but also all those who love and depend on them. Second, disenfranchisement that is the product of contact with criminal legal systems creates and perpetuates a gap in representation. Disenfranchised people do not exist in a vacuum. They are parents, spouses, children, and partners. Denying their right to vote denies their ability to directly represent not only themselves, but also their communities. Instead, disenfranchisement creates a secondary representation model in which those who live in affected communities depend on others to represent and defend their interests. At best, someone else’s vote aligns with the interests of those in disenfranchised communities. More often, the votes of those outside the community become acts of charity and otherizing. This is clear in descriptions of social policy. Through rhetorical tropes ranging from “welfare queens” to “law and order,” those in power promulgate policies constructed around the suggestion that there are populations requiring support, saving, and protection through secondary representation as opposed to enjoying the ability to represent themselves and their own interests . And so, this paper joins an existing conversation about power, representation, and exclusion with a conjoined narrative—a firsthand account of disenfranchisement, community organizing, and the democratic harm wrought by current policies.

First Page

341

Last Page

366

Num Pages

26

Volume Number

110

Publisher

University of Virginia School of Law

Notes

Available online at https://virginialawreview.org/articles/reconstructing-citizenship/

Recommended Citation

Jenny E. Carroll & James Jeter, Reconstructing Citizenship, 110 Va. L. Rev. Online 341 (2024).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/facscholar/2153

File Type

PDF