On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

Prison halts movement in space and takes away time. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, prison deprived millions of Americans of the years when they might have been educated, found a job, or had children. It also stripped many of them of the vote, their voice in the political future. Denying the franchise to felons is morally hazardous. It incentivizes aspiring tyrants to define felonies in a way that suits their own political aspirations—in short, to lock up people who might vote against them. More fundamentally, it is inconsistent with any program of freedom to create urban zones of hopelessness as a matter of policy. Those Americans who were incarcerated from the 1970s through the 2010s were disproportionately Black. A Black man was about five times more likely to be imprisoned than a white man. A second moral hazard is the American procedure known as prison gerrymandering. Incarcerated people are counted as residents for the purposes of deciding how many elected representatives a given district will have. When prisons are built and filled, the bodies of prisoners increase the electoral power of the nonincarcerated people around them. Urban Americans are extracted from cities where they would have voted and placed in the exurbs or countryside where their bodies magnify the voting power of others—very often others who vote for politicians who run on the platform of building prisons.