More than 2 million Blacks couldn’t vote in 2016 because of felony convictions

(Special from BlackmansStreet.To-day.com) – Blacks in prison usually can’t vote.

More than two million African Americans were disenfranchised from voting in 2016 because of felony convictions, according to a report compiled in advance of the upcoming midterm elections by the Sentencing Project , a Washington, D.C. – based organization that is a leader in changing the way Americans think about crime and punishment.

The report, titled “Expanding the Vote: Two Decades of Felony Disenfranchisement Reform,” noted that more than six million citizens will be ineligible to vote in November 2018’s midterm elections because of felony convictions.

Nearly 4.7 million are not incarcerated. They live in 34 states that prohibit voting by people on probation, parole or who have completed their sentence.

“Racial disparities in the criminal justice system also translate into higher rates of disenfranchisement in communities of color, resulting in one of every 13 African-American adults being ineligible to vote,” the report said.

Some 2,228,118 African Americans were disenfranchised with felony convictions in 2016 out of a voting age population of 29,932,674 for a total disenfranchisement of 7.44 percent for the voting age population.

Those disenfranchised include people in prison, on parole, on felony probation, in jail and in post-sentencing.

There were total 557,169 African Americans in prison in 2016.

Some of the states with the highest number of Black prison inmates were: Texas (58, 254), Alabama (17,775), California (39,451), Florida (50,110), Georgia (31,814), North Carolina (21,304) New York, (25,524) Louisiana (24,848), Pennsylvania (24,360), Virginia (23, 593), and Michigan (23,015).

This article originally published in the October 22, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.