Moral panic.

• Author: Cusac, Anne-Marie
• Position: Books - Conned: How Millions Went to Prison, Lost the Vote, and Helped Send George W. Bush to the White House - Book review

Conned: How Millions Went to Prison, Lost the Vote, and Helped Send George W. Bush to the White House

by Sasha Abramsky The New Press. 288 pages. $25.95.

Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America

by Philip Jenkins Oxford. 344 pages. $28.

Let's start with full disclosure. Sasha Abramsky has written repeatedly for this magazine in recent years. His contributions to The Progressive have included cover stories. As an editor, I have championed his work because Abramsky is a talented, savvy reporter.

Abramsky's new book, his second, treats a subject whose importance is hard to overemphasize. Americans who care about their democracy should know the information in its pages. Here's a tidbit: In Mississippi and Alabama, in 2004, "over 7 percent of all adults had had their right to vote permanently removed. In both of those states, as well as in Florida, Virginia, Washington, New Mexico, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Iowa, more than one quarter of African American men were voteless. In many other states, including Texas, one in five black men had been removed from the electoral rolls." Washington State, where the 2004 governor's race was determined by a tiny margin, is of particular interest here. And, according to Abramsky's arithmetic, if only 2 percent of disenfranchised Floridians had cast votes in the 2000 election and had "split sixty-forty in Al Gore's favor, the Democrat would have become the President come Inauguration Day 2001 ."

Conned begins with a powerful introduction. "In fighting the twinned 'War on Drugs' and 'War on Crime,' modern America has created such a vast penal network that the very cultural and institutional underpinnings of the country's democracy are now under threat," he writes. The book's title is an intelligent pun. Disenfranchisement laws, and the widespread ignorance about them, end up conning the ex-convicts. They also con any U.S. citizen who believes she lives in a democracy.

In the run-up to the 2004 election, Abramsky visited states "that either had particularly egregious disenfranchisement laws or had active political battles shaping up around this issue." He started in June and ended, after five months of travel, in Florida, shortly after the announcement that George W. Bush had once again taken the White House.

"In state after state," he writes, "I heard stories of people who had been turned away from polling booths; people who were sent letters telling them they'd been struck from the electoral rolls; people who spent hours, then days and weeks, trying, and failing, to navigate bureaucratic mazes set up to make the process of getting one's vote back as onerous as possible; and finally, and perhaps most depressingly, entire families for whom the very culture of political participation had been shattered by the pervasive impact of the juiced-up criminal justice system of late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century America."

In Abramsky's book, felony disenfranchisement means two things: denying the vote to anyone convicted of a felony...