Every day, we are barraged by a television commercial (funded in large part by the pro-criminal-rights ACLU) supporting adoption of Florida’s proposed Amendment 4, which would restore voting rights to convicted felons.
Featured in the commercial are clean-cut Brett, his clean-cut wife Mallery and their clean-cut baby girl (whose name is not given). Brett and Mallery tell us how Brett, as a young man, drank too much, got addicted to Oxycontin and ended up being convicted (of what, they don’t tell us).
Now, according to the commercial, Brett has turned his life around, gone straight and, despite his reformation, cannot vote. The message of the commercial is that because of Brett’s story, voters should, by passing Amendment 4, let all felons (with a couple of insignificant exceptions) vote upon completion of their sentences.
So what’s with Brett and Amendment 4? I was curious and decided to learn more.
First, Brett’s story: With very little digging, I found it, thanks to a feature article that appeared last December in the Sarasota Herald Tribune. The article is somewhat sympathetic to Brett but undercuts the credibility of the commercial by bringing out certain facts. For example:
- The commercial ignores the fact that nobody made Brett (whose last name is Ramsden, so he really does exist) drink and get addicted to drugs. And he was hooked on various illegal drugs, not just Oxycontin.
- There is no indication in the commercial or the article that Brett ever applied to have his voting rights restored under the present system.
- Most importantly, the commercial gives the impression that what Brett did was a one-time crime, like maybe steal a car for a little joy ride or get caught with enough Oxy to make it a felony, and that this one-time-crime was committed while Brett was a kid. In fact, Brett’s criminal career, like that of most felons, comprised numerous major crimes and convictions and lasted for 10 years, only ending in 2014. So the bottom line is that Brett is hardly the ideal poster child for Amendment 4.
I hope that Brett is successful in turning his life around, and if he succeeds, I would support his regaining the right to vote. However, his success, if it actually happens, should not serve as an argument for letting all felons vote, regardless of whether or not they have gone straight.
That brings us to the elephant in the room – the statistics that the TV commercial doesn’t mention. Those stats show that if Brett is successful in going straight, he will be one of the small number of felons who do so.
In the great majority of cases, once a criminal, always a criminal. Here is what the Department of Justice had to say as of May of this year: “Five in 6 (83%) state prisoners released in 2005 across 30 states were arrested at least once during the 9 years following their release.” (And those were just the ones who got caught, so the real recidivism rate is considerably higher).
The full report can be read HERE.
While the present bogged-down Florida system of individual petitions for felon-voting-rights-restoration needs fixing, let the Legislature fix it. Given the recidivism rate, the undesirability of having criminals vote, and the desirability of eliminating needless bureaucrats (i.e., the ones reviewing voting-rights-restoration petitions under the present system), a reasonable solution would be legislation providing for automatic reinstatement of voting rights five years after any felon completes his sentence (including parole and probation) – if the felon has not been convicted of a new felony during that period.
But Amendment 4 is based on the naive assumption that once felons have done their prison time, they are magically turned into good guys, immediately deserving the right to vote. The statistics demonstrate that this is pure, unadulterated nonsense.
In fact, the vast majority of released felons return to a life of crime. So let’s wish Brett well in his attempt to beat the odds and turn his life around. But let’s also vote “no” on Amendment 4 and stop unreformed felons from deciding Florida’s notoriously close elections.
Scott Fenstermaker is a Villager and frequent contributor to Villages-News.com
