In the US, felony disenfranchisement affects 5.85 million, around 2.5% of the potential voting population [1].
As I'm sure you know, the US has a very long history of racial bias in incarceration, going all the way back to the Civil War and before. Once black people were given the vote by the Fourteenth Amendment, Southern states took to underhanded means to re-disenfranchise them. Literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, etc. Any arbitrary voting requirement they could manufacture that "just happened" to exclude more blacks than whites was fair game.
It was (and still is) bad enough to force a federal law to try to clamp it down, the Voting Rights Act of 1965[2], considered one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation.
After that, Nixon declared the War on Drugs ostensibly to reduce drug use, which it has been famously ineffective at. John Erlichman, his domestic policy advisor at the time later claimed:
> The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two
> enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m
> saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war
> or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with
> marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we
> could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their
> homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the
> evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
Whether or not that's true, the War on Drugs has been an excellent vehicle to incarcerate more people. Those incarerations have history of racial bias. In 1998, African-Americans, who only comprised 13% of regular drug users, made up for 35% of drug arrests, 55% of convictions, and 74% of people sent to prison for drug possession crimes. Nationwide African-Americans were sent to state prisons for drug offenses 13 times more often than white men.[3]
In 2010, black people made up 13% of the US population, but 40% of the incarcerated. Black people are imprisoned at something like 5 times the rate of white people.[4]
As I'm sure you know, the US has a very long history of racial bias in incarceration, going all the way back to the Civil War and before. Once black people were given the vote by the Fourteenth Amendment, Southern states took to underhanded means to re-disenfranchise them. Literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, etc. Any arbitrary voting requirement they could manufacture that "just happened" to exclude more blacks than whites was fair game.
It was (and still is) bad enough to force a federal law to try to clamp it down, the Voting Rights Act of 1965[2], considered one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation.
After that, Nixon declared the War on Drugs ostensibly to reduce drug use, which it has been famously ineffective at. John Erlichman, his domestic policy advisor at the time later claimed:
Whether or not that's true, the War on Drugs has been an excellent vehicle to incarcerate more people. Those incarerations have history of racial bias. In 1998, African-Americans, who only comprised 13% of regular drug users, made up for 35% of drug arrests, 55% of convictions, and 74% of people sent to prison for drug possession crimes. Nationwide African-Americans were sent to state prisons for drug offenses 13 times more often than white men.[3]In 2010, black people made up 13% of the US population, but 40% of the incarcerated. Black people are imprisoned at something like 5 times the rate of white people.[4]
See also:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/opinion/the-racist-origin...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/virgini...
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jul/13/felon-voting-l...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_the_War_on_Drugs#cite...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_in_the_United_States_crim...
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