Tuesday, November 3, 2020, will mark a decisive election, but for voters it won’t just be a president they will be electing, local and state measures will also be decided on.
One of those measures is California Proposition 17 also known as the Voting Rights Restoration for Persons on Parole Amendment.
According to Ballotpedia, Prop 17 is a constitutional amendment that if passed, would allow people on parole for felony convictions to vote in the state of California upon completion of their prison term.
Currently, the state of California does not allow people on state parole to vote until they have completed both their prison sentence and parole.
According to a September report from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Division of Correctional Policy Research and Internal Oversight, there are over 50,000 people on parole in the state of California.
People on state parole are usually released from prison and supervised for a certain time period after part of their sentence has been served and have to abide by certain rules and conditions. This is also viewed as a time to reintegrate citizens into the community.
For Irene Sotelo, an advocate for formerly incarcerated students like herself and graduate student at California State University Long Beach, the passing of Prop 17 could mean more people going to the polls in future elections.
“I know people go to jail and they lose their rights,” Sotelo said. “But the ones who come out, they’re on some sort of supervision, and hey that’s 40,000 people just in California that could be voting and with this [amendment] it will help, that’s adding more people to the ballots.”
Robert Ortiz Archilla, a graduate student at California State University Long Beach, who was formerly incarcerated, supports Proposition 17 because it would give marginalized folks the right to vote.
“If we look demographically,” Ortiz Archilla said in a statement to the Signal Tribune, “We’re talking about 40% of the individuals that are incarcerated are of Latinx origin and then, we’re talking about 39% of African American, ethnicity, so we’re talking about 79% of the people that are incarcerated are people of color.”
According to the Public Policy Institute of California, as of 2017, 28.5% of those in state prison were African American males and 25.9% of women in state prison were African American.
Latino men had an imprisonment rate of 1,016 per 100,000, while Latina women and women of other races were imprisoned at a rate of 38 and 14 per 100,000 persons, respectively.
“So we think of the reasoning behind not allowing these individuals that are on parole to vote is to keep the minorities from voting, bottom line,” Ortiz Archilla said. “So I think that was done strategically and intentionally. Systematic barriers have always been implemented discreetly.”
In 2017, the rate of African American males in prison, 4,236 per 100,000, was ten times the imprisonment rate of white males, which stood at 422 per 100,000, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. African American women were imprisoned at a rate of 171 per 100,00, making it more than five times the imprisonment rate of white women, whose rate is 30 per 100,000.
“The majority of people that are on parole are victim to the mass incarceration movement from what I would call political violence,” Ortiz Archilla said. “Quietly and discreetly this political violence against people of color, and minority people and even white folks that are not educated, white folks, who their socio-economic background is, you know, very, very, very not privileged.”
Sotelo also noted that giving people on parole the right to vote would probably bring some changes to voting demographics.
One of the arguments in favor of Proposition 17 listed in the Official Voter Information Guide maintains that people who complete their prison sentences should be encouraged to reenter society and have a stake in the community. It argues that civic engagement “is connected to lower rates of recidivism,” or the tendency of a convicted person to re-offend.
“Recidivism rates are really high because you release someone back to the same environment and back to the same political structure,” Ortiz Archila said. “It’s like releasing a fish back into the same pond that they were caught in, you’re gonna get caught again.”
“Prop 17 would allow people to vote and change the system and change the pond, so now they have more options,” he said.
If passed, California would join 19 other states who restore their citizen’s right to vote after completing their prison term, including Texas, New Mexico, Washington and Georgia.
Among the proposition’s other supporters is Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia, the California Democratic Party and state Governor Gavin Newsom.
The state measure also has opposition, with the California Republican Party and Republican State Senator Jim Nielsen standing against it.
One of the arguments against Proposition 17 claims that those in prison have been convicted of serious and violent crimes and allowing social equality would reopen the wounds of those who have been victimized.
Ortiz Archilla however, contended, that there’s many reasons why people are on parole.
“We have this taboo that just because you’re on parole, you’re like a monster. You could be on parole for numerous reasons, not just because you murdered someone,” he said.
Another argument against the measure asks for people on parole to prove rehabilitation before voting rights are restored.
Ortiz Archilla went on to offer a solution for those opposed to the measure.
“I think that to bring peace to someone that argues against Prop 17, what we can also do is, we can say ‘hey let’s do a pilot. It’s a five-year pilot program.’ And I’m like, 100% confident that we will prove everybody wrong because I have proved everybody wrong.”
He continued, “Not just me but all my peers, all my fellows, even my students right now. Day in and day out we put in the work and we prove people wrong.” Ortiz plans to pursue a doctorate degree and attributes a lot of his success to Project Rebound, a program supporting the higher education and integration of formerly incarcerated students at the California State University level.
For both Sotelo and Ortiz Archilla, who advocate for formerly incarcerated students with the student-led group Rising Scholars at CSULB, Prop 17 would simply restore a basic right to California residents.
“We lose everything,” Sotelo said. “The struggle to get back into society, all of that, this is one more right, it humanizes us back into society, it makes us feel like we’re human again.”
