Also Us Citizens: Prisoners Should Be Allowed to Vote

The United States of America has been fighting throughout history for individual rights and freedoms, ever since 1792 when Kentucky was the first state in the US to ban felons from voting. Now, the only two states that one can vote while in prison are Maine and Vermont.

One of the most controversial topics has been the right to vote. Every citizen of the US deserves the right to vote, and it should not be something that has the ability to be taken away. Should prisoners be allowed to vote? Essay on this question is quite controversial.

Prisoners should be allowed to vote because it is an individual right. Our Founding Fathers decided that we should have the right to vote, even if you are a prisoner. If one does not have the right to vote than it is going against the eighth amendment, which is having fair and not cruel punishments.

It is cruel to not have the right to vote just because you are in prison, even if you are a citizen you are not allowed to vote in prison. Not only is voting a civil right, not voting is a civil death which the government has been trying to stray away from the past couple of decades. Prisoners should be allowed to vote to express their political views and have rights to the first amendment, freedom of speech. For over 30 years, the government has been wanting to give prisoners better living space and more rights they can have inside the prison that they did not have previously. An example of that is when 13 states allow ex-felons to vote after their sentences ended, and they went through a procedure to show that they are sane and have the ability to think right.

According to Martin Luther King Jr. “No nation can long continue to flourish or to find its way to a better society while it allows any one of its citizens to be denied the right to participate in the most fundamental of all privileges of democracy- the right to vote.” This is a quote that MLK said when he was fighting for equal rights with slavery. You can compare it to present days and how he thinks that every citizen should deserve the right to vote. Just because they have commited a crime does not mean they should have the right of voting taken away from them.

There are no reasons why prisoners should not be allowed to vote in this essay, because every prisoner deserves the right to vote. It is their individual right, it could help them re-enter society, and could influence the election.

Works Cited

1. American Civil Liberties Union. (n.d.). Felony Disenfranchisement Laws Map. Retrieved from https://www.aclu.org/issues/voting-rights/voter-restoration/felony-disenfranchisement-laws-map
2. Bates, K., & Pennington, D. (2018). The Ethics of Prisoner Voting. Oxford University Press.
3. Human Rights Watch. (2018). Democracy on Lockdown: US Election Sanctions and Vulnerable Communities.
4. Jacobson, M. (2019). Prisoner disenfranchisement and suffrage in the United States. The Oxford Handbook of Electoral Systems, 599-617.
5. National Conference of State Legislatures. (2022). Felon Voting Rights. Retrieved from https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/felon-voting-rights.aspx
6. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. (2022). The Right to Political Participation.
7. Soss, J., Schram, S., Vartanian, T., & O'Brien, K. (2019). Setting the terms of reentry: how state statutes define who gets to vote after a criminal conviction. Law & Social Inquiry, 44(1), 1-34.
8. The Sentencing Project. (2021). Felony Disenfranchisement: An Overview. Retrieved from https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/felon-voting-rights/
9. Travis, J., Western, B., & Redburn, S. (2014). The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences. National Academies Press.
10. Uggen, C., & Manza, J. (2002). Voting and Subsequent Crime and Arrest: Evidence from a Community Sample. Columbia Human Rights Law Review, 34(1), 51-82.