Neighborhoods and Felony Disenfranchisement

The Case of New York City

Bibliographic Data

ID6405171
AuthorsK T Morris (0000-0001-7725-6723, Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, New York City, NY, USA, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume57
Issue5
Pages1203-1225
Publication date2021-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueUrban Affairs Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1078-0874 • E-ISSN: 1552-8332
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1078087420921522
OpenAlexW3028259513
LanguageEN
Citations received9
References cited41

Over the past two decades, scholars have sought to estimate the direct and indirect effects of felony disenfranchisement on political representation. This literature, however, has often overlooked both the geographic concentration of communities impacted by overincarceration and the low propensity to vote exhibited by individuals convicted of felony crimes. In this article, I redefine “lost voters” as disenfranchised individuals with a history of participating in elections. I map these individuals to their preincarceration addresses and use multiple approaches to explore whether their home neighborhoods turned out at lower rates than other neighborhoods in the 2017 New York City (NYC) mayoral election. I find that neighborhoods that were home to lost voters turned out at substantially lower rates than similar neighborhoods, and that Black neighborhoods are particularly impacted by the spillover effects of disenfranchisement. These indirect effects of the incarceration of would-be voters may have serious implications for the representation of impacted neighborhoods

Criminology · Demographic economics · Economics · Political science · Politics · Representation (politics · Sociology · Spillover effect · Urban politics · Voting · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Law · Public Administration

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