As election day approaches, there is increased reporting about Republican-led initiatives to prevent marginalized Americans from voting. These efforts extend beyond the longstanding disenfranchisement of incarcerated people, with many states now barring those on probation or parole from participating in the electoral process.
The violation of this fundamental right to participate in democracy is not new to us. The disenfranchisement of incarcerated people is directly linked to the exception for slavery enshrined in the Constitution.
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction,” the Thirteenth Amendment states.
The enslaved were never allowed to vote. Even the formerly enslaved were barred from voting until the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. Women were likewise disenfranchised until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. However, disenfranchisement has always been normalized by the carceral state.
More than a century later, in 2024, Republican lawmakers are now attempting to aggressively purge hundreds of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls because they were recently released from prison. Where I am incarcerated in North Carolina, the conservative state Supreme Court ruled last year that it’s lawful to delay the restoration of voting rights until a formerly incarcerated person completes their probation, parole, or post-release supervision.
These recent efforts targeting the voting rights of justice-involved people are designed to suppress potential Democratic voters in Republican-leaning states. Why? In theory, the disproportionate number of Black and brown people in prison are more likely to vote Democrat and support policies that address justice reform, community policing, and mass incarceration.
While it may be true that formerly incarcerated people are more likely to vote for Democratic candidates, as a class, we are not a monolith—especially as it relates to our political beliefs. Just like the rest of society, we share a broad range of political ideologies—including those that are self-defeating.
Over the last decade, discussions with my peers on North Carolina’s death row have revealed that a significant number identify with right-wing ideology. In this group of approximately 29 prisoners, which accounts for nearly a fourth of the state’s death row population, the ability to vote today would mean choosing a straight Republican ticket. When asked why, most said Democrats are no better than Republicans.
In the context of incarceration in North Carolina, it’s certainly difficult to argue otherwise.
In North Carolina, former Democratic Gov. Mike Easley was a staunch proponent of death sentences and presided over 27 executions. (Current Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper was Easley’s Attorney General.) Former Democratic Gov. Beverly Perdue fought to prevent people sentenced to life from getting out under the Fair Sentencing Act—even after they spent decades in prison. And rather than abolish the death penalty, the Democratic-controlled General Assembly passed the Racial Justice Act (RJA) in 2009 to allow people on death row to challenge their sentence if they could demonstrate that race played a role in their sentencing and jury selection. However, the RJA has effectively only kept executions on hold because the law remains mired in litigation 15 years after its passage.
While some may assume that today’s divisive political environment is pushing prisoners right, Republican ideology—regardless of how their policies negatively impact life and liberty—is actually not new to prison. The Republican party’s current iteration mirrors the propaganda and rhetoric used by the Tea Party and the “birthers” in the GOP during President Barack Obama’s first term in office—politics that were also embraced in American prisons. Still, it’s worth delving into why the divisiveness of identity politics under the MAGA movement speaks to men on death row.
The irony of death row Republicans
“Rehabilitation” in prison translates to preparation through education and training in order to become a contributing member of society through economic means (employment) and political ones (voting). The theory is that if a person is truly rehabilitated, the faulty thinking that led to their incarceration will be left behind, replaced instead by opportunities to become a self-sustaining, law-abiding citizen. But the carceral system doesn’t place much emphasis on addressing the lack of political education we receive in prison or on our inability to participate in elections.
No American citizen is required to vote, of course. However, if contributing to democracy means having a say in how the government functions, then participating in elections is essential. Incarcerated people are denied this right while being impacted by elections in ways no other citizens experience. And yet, for many incarcerated people, there is a disconnect between the political information they consume, the ideology behind the political rhetoric, and how the policies affecting life and liberty are deeply shaped by identity.
It would also help incarcerated people to understand how elections impact them as a class.
For example, in 2020, Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court Cheri Beasley lost to her Republican challenger, Paul Newby. Under Beasley, the court held a Democratic majority, and rulings often advanced constitutional rights for marginalized groups—including the incarcerated. The Democratic court set the tone for the superior, district, and appellate courts, namely that discrimination and the subversion of due process would not be tolerated.
In contrast, under Chief Justice Newby, the court is now majority Republican and has focused on reversing a number of previous court rulings. Under Newby, the North Carolina Supreme Court has summarily dismissed claims from incarcerated people stating their rights were violated by the state.
Beasley lost to Newby by a little over 400 votes, and two other Democratic justices on the court also lost to their Republican challengers. If thousands of North Carolinians had not been disenfranchised and denied the right to vote, they may have been able to prevent the entrenchment of injustice in the state Supreme Court.
But some certainly would have voted to entrench injustice.
Those on death row who profess support for the new Republican ideology are primarily older white men drawn to the toxic masculinity of Trump’s “tough guy” persona. They come from working class and poor backgrounds, did not attend college, and consider themselves “patriotic.” A third of them have served in a branch of the military, and, in most cases, they support the use of the death penalty. None of the 29 people on death row I have spoken with about this topic seem to believe that the ideological shift in the North Carolina Supreme Court worsened their chances for appellate relief.
Indeed, when discussing the makeup of the Supreme Court, the only real information they could offer was that the previous chief justice was a Black woman and the current Chief Justice is a white man. Of those I spoke to, several claimed Beasley was only interested in helping Black incarcerated people, which to them meant that white incarcerated people would not receive help. It’s worth noting that none of the men could point to any case or other evidence showing that Beasley seemed to favor the race of one defendant over another, and only a few could correctly identify the constitutional amendments that applied to them.
My peers borrow their ideas from the right-wing pundits they listen to on the radio or see on FOX News, talking heads like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Brian Kilmead, among others. The conspiracy theories, misinformation, disinformation, “alternative facts,” and the Republican identity politics they’ve come to embrace draw from white nationalism and the moral panic that white dominance is threatened by BIPOC and programs that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Civil Rights are broadly viewed as something that devalues white lives, takes away white jobs, and silences white voices. These political talking points are dog whistles summoning racial prejudice (anti-DEI legislation), transphobia (attacks on the trans community), xenophobia (criminalization of immigrants), misogyny (elimination of bodily autonomy), and anti-intellectualism (efforts to remove liberal arts programs from public universities).
The irony of death row Republicans I spoke to is that their identification with this particular brand of politics is detached from any understanding of the Constitution, how the government functions, or which branch they are most dependent upon for relief from their death sentence. None, for example, could explain why it is a bad thing Republicans support Constitutional “originalism” that views the text of the Constitution as fixed rather than as a living document. Constitutional originalists like the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia used this belief to uphold the death penalty as constitutional simply because it’s mentioned in the Constitution. Compare this with Justice Thurgood Marshall’s “evolving standard of decency,” which was the standard SCOTUS used to temporarily abolish the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia in 1972.
Otherism abounds
The embrace of harmful ideologies is not a direct result of North Carolina’s incarcerated lacking access to political or legal educational resources. In addition to the TV news channels ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX, the radio carries NPR and BBC news broadcasts right-wing radio shows. In 2022, the North Carolina Department of Adult Corrections also granted digital tablets to people in prisons. The tablets provide access to a law library, educational videos focused on credit recovery, GED preparation, adult continuing education, and College-Level Examination Program (CLEP) courses on government, elections, voting, political history, the U.S. Constitution, and criminal law.
But having access to educational resources is not the same as comprehending them, applying the information to public policy, or thinking about how politics are practically applied to confinement. Media literacy and critical thinking are skills developed through study and training, without which it can be difficult to recognize propaganda or misinformation. Even experts with the ability to fact-check in real time still struggle to keep up with some politicians. Uneducated people already identifying with the rhetoric will naturally succumb to it and subsequently deny reality. Being susceptible to manipulated information—when mixed with hatred for the “other” and fear of change—makes it far more likely that some incarcerated people will follow the algorithm of their own biases.
Otherism abounds in prison, and this fear of the other feeds the tribalism of belonging to one gang or another. Rather than identify with increasingly rare prosocial models of behavior, many inside tap anger, spite, and frustration because these emotions are common. These emotions are what confinement breeds. Seeing the same characteristics manifested in those running for office draws the incarcerated like iron filings to a magnet. After all, someone who hates like they do must be okay since that hatred has been normalized in the U.S. That is why the current amalgamation of Republican identity politics has nearly a quarter of North Carolina’s death-sentenced prisoners willing to vote for people like Trump and Rep. Dan Bishop, who is running for attorney general. Bishop is an election denier, who—if elected—would have “immense power in safeguarding North Carolina’s ‘election integrity’” and “determining its future on voting rights,” NC Newsline reported.
What I have learned about my Republican death row peers isn’t entirely surprising. After all, prison is a microcosm of society. Hatred and prejudice, ignorance, and the weaponization of identity are not any more unique to prison than a lack of understanding about the power of voting.
In an ideal world, every potential voter in prison would take advantage of the educational resources available to them and make an effort to get informed about their rights—especially as people who are being undermined and erased by the very politicians they would vote for.
The Right to Write (R2W) project is an editorial initiative where Prism works with incarcerated writers to share their reporting and perspectives across our verticals and coverage areas. Learn more about R2W and how to pitch here.
