Sanders is correct on voting rights

2020 Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders recently called for restoring voting rights to those currently in the prison system. He's the only candidate to do so, and he's right.

In Michelle Alexander's seminal work, The New Jim Crow, she tells the story of Jarvious Cotton, a Black man disenfranchised by our criminal justice system: "Cotton's family tree tells the story of several generations of Black men who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises ... Cotton's great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many Black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole."

The War on Drugs was designed to usher in this new era of racial control. According to The Sentencing Project, 6.1 million Americans - disproportionately Black men - cannot vote because of a felony conviction. Mass incarceration operates in the same way that Jim Crow and slavery once did: denying basic human rights to large swathes of poor people and people of color.

Felon disenfranchisement attempts to revitalize some of the key components of Jim Crow. Bernie Sanders has come out with a comprehensive plan to combat this: ending cash bail, eliminating private prisons, legalizing/decriminalizing marijuana, and granting voting rights to felons and ex-felons.

Many in the Democratic Party have called out the criminal justice system for being racist, but refuse to endorse policies that will remedy its harm. It's hypocritical to deny rights to millions of people that have been targeted by a system that they admit is fundamentally racist.

Bernie Sanders is leading the field on dismantling this system.

Zach Carter

Mundelein