Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

by Stacey Abrams

Georgia is one of the states that use felonies to rescind voting rights, a law born out of Jim Crow and exacerbated by the state’s unique history of incarceration. This type of disenfranchisement was added to Georgia’s constitution in 1868, and its inclusion reinforced the “Black Codes” and poll taxes intended to suppress Black votes after the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were ratified. Today, nearly 60 percent of Georgians disqualified because of a felony conviction are Black. Georgia has the tenth-highest rate of felony disenfranchisement in the country8 and the state has removed more people from the voter list (nearly 147,000) because of a felony conviction than any other state in the country.9 Under a joint effort by the previous governor and legislators like myself, Georgia attempted to tackle our legacy as a state of mass incarceration, but two-strikes laws (mandatory sentencing after two convictions) and aggressive use of post-release conditions like parole and probation continue to affect potential voters who served time. As of 2016, Georgia had 410,964 people on probation, more than any other state. Although California is the most populous state, with nearly forty million residents, and four times the population of Georgia, the probation numbers are reversed. In 2016, California had 288,911 probationers, half the number of those in Georgia.10 The most restrictive states (Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska...