Databases, Felons, and Voting: Errors and Bias in the Florida Felons Exclusion List in the 2000 Presidential Elections
This paper examines the production and use of the exclusion lists by the state, its private sector contractor, Database Technologies (DBT), and Florida’s 67 counties between 1998 and the 2000 elections. It places the exclusion lists in the context of the social and political structure of the United States and the state of Florida, and interprets its significance within that context. I provide a detailed accounting of the contents of the lists, identify ways in which the lists reveal weaknesses in Florida’s voter list maintenance procedures up to 2000, and identify the types of errors made and biases in the production and use of the lists. The three major findings of the analysis are: a) the 2000 felons’ exclusion list had a considerable number of errors in it, probably more than 25% of the names on the list were on there in error; b) these errors were racially biased, such that more African-American registered voters were on the list in error than either Whites or Latinos; and c) that the decentralized process by which the felons’ list was used to purge the voter rolls resulted in a sometimes judicious but sometimes partisan purging process – Democratic county supervisors were less likely to use the felons’ list than Republican ones, but even the latter found considerable, biased errors in the list.
Differential Punishing of African Americans and Whites Who Possess Drugs: A Just Policy or a Continuation of the Past?
Five African Americans in Minnesota were arrested and charged with possession of a cocaine base, known on the street as crack. The statute that they were charged under provided that possession of 3 or more grams of crack cocaine was a third-degree felony, punishable by up ta 20 years of incarceration, In addition, the same ; statute provided that possession of 10 grams or more of a cocaine powder was a third-degree felony. Less than 10 grams of cocaine powder was a fifth-degree felony, punishable by up to 5 years. In Hennepin County in 1988,97% of the persons m t e d for cocaine base or crack were African Americans, and 80% of the persons arrested for cocaine powder were White. I3ecausc of these statistics and differential punishments, the five African Americans contested the constitutionality of the statute, After hearing the presentation of the issues, the Minnesota Supreme Court upheld the challenge and ruled the statute unconstitutional (State v. Russell, 1991). . The issue of whether African Americans am punished more severely than are White Americans by the criminal justice system and whether the system is racist has bccn debated in the literature (Blumstein, 1982; Johnson, 1992, Peterson & Hagan, 1983). On one hand, some criminal justice professionals have called the
On the Racial Disproportionality of United States' Prison Populations
One of the most distressing and troublesome aspects of the operation of the criminal justice system in the United States is the severe disproportionality between blacks and whites in the composition of prison populations. Although blacks comprise roughly one-eighth of the population, they represent about one-half of the prison population. Thus, the race-specific incarceration rates (the ratio of prisoners to population within each racial group) are grossly disproportionate. This disproportionality has been a source of major concern, largely because it suggests the possibility of gross injustice in the criminal justice system. The racial differences in imprisonment are reflected in Table 1, which presents demographic-specific incarceration rates (in units of prisoners per 100,000 persons within each indicated demographic group) in state prisons (not including federal prisons or local jails) for blacks and whites and their total.1 This table highlights the great sensitivity of in-