The Problem is Here

A man I admire recently retired. He came from humble circumstances, a blue-collar family in New Jersey. He was the first in his family to go to college using his basketball skills to gain a scholarship. He turned that opportunity into a vocation. He earned additional degrees, became a basketball coach to team after team of inner-city black kids, and eventually rose to the level of college President. And he never forgot; he never forgot that education could lift even the most impoverished. There was a second lesson he knew from his life of hard knocks: you can’t ever quit. No matter how badly the odds seem against you, you don’t quit. You play on.

            This man’s mission, his passion, became delivering education to those normally not given easy access. As long as he was president, the underclasses, the disadvantaged, the disconnected, would have a chance to go to college. He even included the incarcerated. “They want to punish you. They want you to suffer. All the talk about corrections, about punishment fitting the crime, isn’t what’s behind this. You get your degrees. You leave here and be the men I know you can be. You don’t quit; you show them.”

            I listened as this remarkable man spoke to a hushed classroom full of students, our students “here,” in this place. It was his vision that started and moved this program forward. It always was an uphill battle. No state money; no public support; no assistance from the powers that be in Richmond; even worse treatment from some of the officers who work here. After all, successful offenders don’t reoffend. Less prisoners means less prisons which means less guard jobs.

            We had a young woman involved in the college program this summer. She’s a visiting scholar from a liberal arts college on the west coast and she read about “here” and wanted to see it for herself. And as she sat in the classes and listened to the discussions and read their words she wanted to let the world know that this matters; in here matters; these men and their lives and their futures matter.

            I was interviewed the other day by this young scholar. She remarked how across the board the students “look up” to me.” They respect you and have great affinity for you,” she said. And, I choked up and told her about my failure as a father and how I came here and was asked to join this program to teach, and tutor, and mentor and how the judge and all those who judged me and sent me away to suffer and rue what had become of my life had failed. I turned 55 the week before and I told her I kept hearing David’s words in Psalm 37.

            “I have been young, and now am old;

            Yet, I have not seen the righteous forsaken,

            Nor his descendants begging bread …   

                     ‘

            There was a professor working in here this summer. She is conservative, Republican, a Fox News watcher. And her experiences in here have, as she told the class, caused her to look at what she took as Gospel; there are consequences for a wrong, but should the consequences never cease? Should you pay forever? That’s the problem in “here” and every time someone from out there comes in they see it.

            I was like that professor. I never met a Republican, a conservative, I didn’t like. And I was sure I knew everything about right and wrong; life wasn’t hued, it was black and white.

            “The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord

            And He delights in his way.

            Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down;

            For the Lord upholds him with His hand.”

            The professor wants to return to teach here again because this matters. She’s right. As I told the young scholar interviewing me, I thought I was being sent to prison to suffer and die ashamed. Instead I’ve learned to live.

            Here are a few facts from around the country to consider. It costs a student $37,000 for tuition at Princeton; it costs New Jersey $44,000 to keep a person in a state prison for one year. Think Virginia’s any different? Instate tuition averages $14,000. It costs the commonwealth $26,000 per year for an inmate in one of its prisons.

            California has to most people in prison and in college. If the state emptied every prison and sent every released person to college it would save $7 billion a year.

            The United States has far and away the highest incarceration rate in the world. If the incarceration rates of individual states are compared with other nations you would see that 36 states and the District of Columbia have incarceration rates higher than that of Cuba, the next highest nation. Yes, Virginia is in that group of 36.

            Law Professor Michelle Alexander, author of the controversial treatise, “Mass Incarceration: The New Jim Crow” recently penned an op-ed piece for Sojourner.  In it she quotes the research of Harvard Professor Kaia Stern (Dr. Stern specializes in prison education and is also an ordained minister. She also visited this facility a few years ago in preparation for a new text she was writing: “Voices from American Prisons: Faith, Education, and Healing.”) Alexander wrote:

“The system of mass incarceration is rotten to its core. As Dr. Kaia Stern eloquently explains in her book … the quintupling of our prison population in a few short decades and the relegation of tens of millions of people to permanent second-class status is a reflection of the fact that we in the United States are captive to a “spirit of punishment.” She writes, “there is no more pressing human rights, issue, no more urgent spiritual crossroads or threat to democracy than the current penal crisis.”

            Both Stern and Alexander speak the truth. America cannot nor will not ever be, that “shining city” on the hill Ronald Reagan so eloquently spoke of (borrowing from John’s Revelation) until the soul of this country burns for righteousness and mercy – two tenets at the foundation of our Judeo Christian parentage which are ignored “here.”

            I have never met a young student who has told me “I am innocent.” No, they tell me they did the crime; they accept punishment. But consequences for one’s actions must have a termination date. And a remorseful, rehabilitated man – or woman – must be allowed to live free and be welcomes back to society.

            “Here” is a leper colony. “Here” are criminals and dredges of society; losers; drug addicts; thieves, murderers. And I can’t help but remember the Gospel writers over and over as they told the stories of Jesus. It was these untouchables who the Lord cared for, and ate with, and forgave. You may not want to know what goes on in “here,” but I can assure you Jesus is here. He is with the disadvantaged, the discouraged, the disenfranchised.

            Political courage. We lack leaders with political courage who will tell you that what I write is true: prisons are failing; punishment does not fit the crime. April 4, 1968, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee. Inner cities around the nation erupted as news of the assassination spread.

            Senator Robert Kennedy, Democratic candidate for President, was in downtown Indianapolis. Against the advice and wishes of his staff and Indianapolis police (who couldn’t “guarantee” his safety), Kennedy left the hotel and went to the worst housing project in the city. He stood on a car and spoke about pain in the loss of a great leader; he listened as black citizens expressed their dismay and anger, and then he quoted the Greek philosopher Aeschylus: “Excruciating pain leads to greater wisdom.” Indianapolis – unlike almost every other urban center in America that night – remained calm. Political courage.

            The problem is “here.” Prison doesn’t rehabilitate anyone. Prison doesn’t make you more likely to follow the law. And while some violent sociopaths must remain forever separated from society, for the vast majority sentenced, their time behind bars and their treatment after release destroys more lives than are changed. In spite of that, young men in the college program here believe if they just get their degree they can overcome. Even with the odds stacked against them from a society which talks of “second chances” almost with a sarcastic sneer, they believe.

            They believe because of men like Dr. John who tells them not to quit. They believe because professors like Joan, Amy, Joy, Allie, and Anne come out here and treat them like scholars, not felons. They believe because it is in the human DNA to overcome, overcome where they came from, what they did and what is in “here.”

            The great African-American writer James Baldwin wrote a letter to his nephew that became a major portion of his great 1942 book, The Fire Next Time. It was a book of cathartic anger at a white society that continued to place blacks in second-class status. Often, I return to his remarkable words as a holder of the “Scarlet F” (felon). For six years I have held a front row seat to “here.” Instead of destroying me, this place and my God’s intervention have opened my eyes. I read Baldwin’s words and I know in spite of “here” these men will overcome.

            “For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what it must become. It will be hard, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost My dungeon shook and my chains fell off ...”

Facts Matter. Paula, Atticus, and Me.

A lot was made in here over Chef Paula Deen’s disclosure that “once…thirty years ago…” she’d used the dreaded “N” word.  As with most things that happen on the outside, I am constantly amazed at the direction conversations take after news stories – if you consider some obese Southern chef’s use of a derogatory word newsworthy – break.

Guys in here have skewed ways of looking at things.  What with the prevalence of quasi-religions formed on racial myths, there is a huge distortion of fact from fiction.  Conspiracy theories abound on every subject under the sun.  History revisions occurs more frequently than my ex rewriting our twenty-eight years together.  So, I take most of what I hear in stride, chalking up the ridiculous points being made to sheer ignorance.

But, anything involving race gets magnified in here (can’t wait to see how the George Zimmerman murder trial plays out!).  And, Paula Deen’s idiotic handling of an embarrassing remark is no different.  As the news made major hay out of her ignorant behavior (have you noticed how everyday we have to have “breaking news”?), the guy in the bunk next to me asked me if I thought she deserved to be fired.  “That’s not the question”, I told him.  My prior “legal life” taught me that you can be fired for a good reason, a bad reason, or even no reason, just not an illegal reason (i.e.:  because of race, creed, sex, religion, national origin or sexual orientation).

The real question is, in a free society what’s off limits anymore?  If the “N” word is offensive, then it should be held as such regardless of the user.  And, at that precise moment, my next door neighbor had B.E.T. on showing yet another rap video built around drugs, drinking, scantily clad women, and dropping the “N” word.

“You glorify this stuff and these performers who cause much more damage in the black community than anything some overweight redneck cook from Savannah could say.”  He looked at me for a second, said that there’s a difference between a black artist using the term and a white southerner.  Fair enough, I responded.  And just then, it happened.   One of his buddies walked up to us and said, “Hey Dom, my main Ni—a from home just got here.  He’s a bad M—f—n—a!”  I looked at Dom and said, “Case closed”. 

People say and do stupid things.  Or as Atticus Finch told his young daughter “Scout” in “To Kill a Mockingbird”, “you never know what someone’s going through ‘til you walk around in his shoes.”  It is important to remember that Atticus told his daughter that after she asked him if he was a “n---- lover” for defending a black man accused of raping a white woman in a small, 1932 Mississippi town.

“Don’t say n---- Scout.”  And then, he proceeded to explain to his daughter that he took that case because if he hadn’t, “I couldn’t hold my head up and look you and your brother in the eyes.”  It was that book and Gregory Peck’s portrayal in the movie that led me to want to be an attorney.  I learned early in my legal career, however, that no matter how gifted I was as a trial attorney, I was no Gregory Peck.  Life, outside of celluloid, is much more nuanced.  Clients, case decisions, aren’t as black and white as Atticus Finch confronted.

This blog is not in defense of Paula Deen.  She said numerous stupid things and followed them up with a defense that only reinforced the public’s opinion that she is ignorant.  What this is about is seeing the big picture, the human frailty in all of us to be the next Paula Deen.

There has been a heavy concentration of blog responses recently about my “right” to describe life in here.  I accept and welcome that discussion.  But, discussions must be based on facts.  As the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it, “Every one is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.”  Paula Deen has an opinion; it just doesn’t match with reality.  Just like the ignorant men in here with their conspiracy theories and arguments, their opinions don’t align with the facts. 

Here are the facts:

The United States has the highest percentage of its population incarcerated.  The number of citizens in the U.S. under some form of correctional control is now 1 in 33.  When Ronald Reagan was President it was 1 in 78.  We have 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s inmates.  About 65 million Americans have a criminal record.  The U.S. prison system costs nearly $60 billion a year.  In 1985, that cost was slightly less than $9 billion.

The risk of going to prison does not act as a deterrent to the commission of most crimes.  Fact is, most people misidentify the risk of being caught and the resulting punishment. 

There is no correlation between length of sentence and re-offending.  In fact, the studies done on nonviolent offenders sentenced to prison actually conclude that exposure to violent prison conditions leads to increased recidivism.

Those are the facts.  Economically, prisons fail at their mission.  Rehabilitatively, they likewise fail.  Philosophically, what does it say about this country – and the ethic of the citizenry that we will accept a failed system that destroys lives in the name of corrections?

Prison reform is coming.  And, surprisingly, it is being pushed by Conservative Republicans who see corrections as a gar hole that accomplishes no redeeming social policy, as well as Evangelical Christians who ask, “What would Jesus do?”  Jesus, I am confident, would be (and is) ministering to those behind bars.

As for me, my life is an open book.  As the one commenter who knows me already knows, my life is on the blog.  And while the writer’s opinion of me isn’t very flattering, neither is it factually accurate.

For one thing, DOC in Virginia does not allow inmates access to the internet (some states do).  I provide my observations to a person’s blog for free and handwritten.  Those blogs are then typeset.

Second, my guilt was never in doubt.  At no time did I seek a plea deal or offer any medical or addiction cause for my actions. In a seven minute address to the court on the day of my sentencing, I acknowledged sole responsibility for my actions.  I apologized to my family, my employer, friends and the community.  I told the judge I deserved incarceration.  I then asked him to temper his sentence to give me an opportunity to correct the wrongs I committed.

I have never once “whined” about being sent to prison.  I broke the law and knew there was the likelihood of my arrest and incarceration.  In fact, I consider my arrest a turning point in my life.  For too long I lived with guilt knowing I was living a lie.

And my Atticus moment – I’ve learned that most people are decent.  There are some who are evil and need to be separated from society and prison – safe, secure, well-maintained prisons – are needed for them.

But for the vast majority of men and women put in prison, the experience leads to a life of despair and failure.  Surely, a nation with the intellect, character, and fortitude of this one can do better.  “Walk in another man’s shoes”, urged Atticus. 

People don’t know why I did what I did.  And, that’s ok.  But, I ask you to consider:  Consider being desperate to get your spouse back from sadness and depression.  You make the decision, you violate your own moral code and you feel like hell.  But, it works.  And, you always come back to that approach whenever things are tough because it works.

I won’t go into detail and if I had to do it over I would have made different decisions all the way back to college.  And, whether you think that warrants my behavior doesn’t change the fact that prisons fail and America can, and must, do better.

An Immigrant's Tale

I have a friend in here named Omar and I call him “O man.” Funny, one of the closest friends I had outside was a guy at work I nicknamed “O man.” Then, I was arrested and like so many others, he fell off the map. I learned a lot about the real meaning of friendship and commitment after my arrest. Those are great words, but they don’t mean much until everything is on the line and you find yourself alone. The few who stick it out, you soon discover, teach you what friendship is all about.

            I don’t overuse the word friend anymore. So, when I say someone is a friend, I’ve made a determination that they can be trusted, that they’re in line with my values, my views, and they are at least trying to move forward. With those gut feeling standards in place, I can think of only five men in this environment whom I can call friend. Ironically, that’s about the same number outside who have hung in there through this midlife correction.

            This blog isn’t about friendship; it’s about Omar’s story and its relevance to today’s headlines. Omar is thirty-three and has been incarcerated since he was seventeen. If things remain as is with no change in goodtime earning levels, he will leave DOC custody in 2019. Omar was born in Chesterfield County. His parents are naturalized U.S. citizens, having earned their citizenship in the late 1980s. And that’s where the story begins.

            Before Omar was born, first his father and then his mother fled El Salvador. During the 1970s, that nation was engaged in an East-West proxy war. Communist rebels battled government troops. There were right-wing paramilitary death squads that went out at night and summarily executed regime opponents. In the mountainous rural areas of the country, the Communist leaning rebels exerted their influence and used violence and fear to intimidate the population.

            In all our debates and name calling about “illegals” and America’s immigration policy, we tend to hear very little about the people who come here. Why would they risk their lives and their stability to come to America? I tell the college guys they need to develop empathy and see struggles and difficulties through the other man’s eyes. America needs a lesson in empathy.

            Omar’s parents, a young couple with two small children, had had enough. Their children needed a chance to live in peace and prosperity. They left their two small children in San Salvador and made the dangerous trek north to America. That’s right, his parents came here illegally.

            They settled in Chesterfield County and began making a new life for themselves. They both worked hard, paid taxes (ironic isn’t it? Illegals pay taxes and social security). They sent for their two young children and had a third, Omar, a natural born U.S. citizen. And, they lived with the knowledge that it could all be lost if they were found out.

            America did a strange thing. It elected – not once, but twice – a former movie actor turned conservative champion. Ronald Reagan, the darling of 21^st century Republicans and Tea Party activists, saw a need to solve the immigration problem and his solution was positively radical. He gave illegals an avenue for citizenship. People like Omar’s parents who’d come here illegally yet began to build lives, pay taxes, and live the American dream, were given an opportunity to become citizens.

            Was it strange that Reagan – the man who brought the “Evil Empire” (the Soviet Union) to its knees – would be creator of this plan? No. Reagan believed America was the “shining city on the hill” (a beautiful biblical reference). People came here because they believed in the dream of America. Omar was there as a little boy when his mother and father – after months of English and civics lessons (learning things most natural born citizens don’t know) – stood in the main Federal courtroom in Richmond and took their oath of citizenship.

            Omar took a wrong turn at seventeen. He committed a series of armed robberies which gave him more than twenty years behind bars. When we first started talking he told me how much regret he felt. “My folks risked everything to come here for my brother and sister and then me. They wanted a good life, but I let them down.” And yet, like millions of families in this country, they have stood by their son. America, is after all, a land of second chances.

            I thought about Omar’s family as I watched the recent political go round over immigration. I’ve met dozens of men in here whose families came to this country illegally to find a better life. As these men do their time, their families wait and wonder: Will he be sent back? Will our secret be discovered?

            I don’t know what the answer is, but I know this: the immigrants have more faith in America than Americans do. They believe this country is a land of opportunity. They believe anyone here can start anew. We need immigrants. We need people who will say your economic level, your nationality, or your record will not keep you from being a productive member of society.

            My mother is two generations removed from men who came to this country in steerage from Italy. They entered at Ellis Island and clearing that hurdle they were automatically citizens. There was no seven year wait, or debate about locking the border. We forget that. We have always been a nation of transplants, people who left home and family, sometimes disgrace, for a second chance.

            What does this blog have to do with prison? Try this: America holds itself out to a higher ideal. We are the land of second chances, the land where you can get a new opportunity. It’s time we as a nation start living up to our ideal. For the vast majority of immigrants – legal and illegal – and for the vast majority of the incarcerated – America’s ideals are our only hope.

            We can be the shining city on the hill or we can be just another country. That is what the debate of immigration – or prison reform for that matter – is really all about.

Missing the Message

The nation celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day the other day.  In a strange twist, it fell on the same day that the nation’s first Black President celebrated his inauguration and the beginning of his second term.  Living in a place with such a large percentage of Black men you would assume the day resonates with them.  Unfortunately, there is a great deal of ambivalence among the young, incarcerated Black men in here.  And in the white ranks, it borders on contempt.  Much of it arises from ignorance, from missing the message.

There is an old political story from the days of Ronald Reagan’s election.  A well-off Park Avenue liberal was bemoaning to her friends that Reagan won a landslide reelection.  “I don’t know how”, she said.  “I don’t know anyone who voted for him.”  And so it goes for most of the young Black men I know in here.

“I don’t know anyone who respects King,” said Will, a normally very bright studious twenty-eight year old.  “He sold out.  He isn’t a leader of our community.”  As he spoke, three or four other equally young bright Black men nodded in agreement.  “White people like King.”  I could only smile.

I then pointed out that according to surveys among Black Americans; Dr. King is the single most revered figure in American history.  No other person even comes close.  Whites, on the other hand, hold mixed feelings, partly out of the battle over enshrining his birthday as a national holiday and partially over the ugly strains of prejudice that somehow continue to lie just below the surface.

“How can that be?”  My young friend asked.  I don’t know anyone who likes him.  I thought of the wealthy liberal in New York who couldn’t grasp that her view wasn’t the norm.  And I wondered how so many could miss the true meaning of Dr. King’s words, how so many miss the message.

Imagine a young Black man who graduates college in his teens.  He comes from an educated family of ministers in the segregated South.   He heads to Boston to begin graduate studies in Theology, and he discovers the words and works of a half-naked Indian lawyer named Gandhi.  King reads Gandhi’s words and sees in Gandhi’s message of peaceful, nonviolent protest the Christian response to oppression. 

All during his time in Boston King honed his message of using a nonviolent response to evil.  At age twenty-six, King earned his PhD.  He and his young bride accepted a call to a church in Montgomery, Alabama.  It is difficult to imagine America, the South, back in the 1950’s.  Most of the young men in here are quick to use the term “Jim Crow”, but they know nothing of it.  Theirs is a world of Rap singers being number one on the charts, of interracial couples, of a Black President winning a second term.  They know nothing of “colored only” bathrooms and water fountains.  They can’t fathom that you could be arrested for sitting at a lunch counter in a public restaurant or refusing to give up your seat to a white person on a public bus.

This was the world Martin and Coretta King ventured into in Montgomery, a world of separate but woefully unequal.  King preached nonviolence, and forgiveness, and mercy while his flock was regularly embarrassed, humiliated, or worse by their white counterparts.  It didn’t take long for King to find an issue to rally the Black community.

It came in the package of a petite, quiet Black woman who refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery public bus to a White passenger.  When asked year’s later why she subjected herself to arrest and death threats, Rosa Parks simply replied, “I was tired.”

“I was tired.”  Tired of indignity, and disrespect, and disobedience to the laws of her God, that all men and women are God’s precious children.  In those three words the Civil Rights movement found their direction and Dr. King became the movement’s Moses.

Dr. King led marches and boycotts and protests – always nonviolent protests – to challenge the conscience of a nation.  So often he and his followers were met with arrest and violence, horrible violence.

“You must love your enemy,” he would tell anyone who would listen.  Loving your enemy, seeing the Godliness in the most evil of men, is usually easier then liking your enemy.  It’s tough, he would say, to like someone who is beating you, or opening up a high-powered fire hose on you, or lynching you.  “Love your enemy.  Do not return his evil with evil.”

No American orator or writer captured the affirmative duty of a man of faith to nonviolently challenge evil – even to the point of death – as Dr. King did.  His “Letter from Birmingham Jail” stands as one of the great written statements of Christian faith in action.  His, “I Have A Dream” speech eloquently captures the Biblical dream of America as a land where all God’s children are truly free. 

Freedom.   I watch these young, Black men miss the poetic beauty of freedom.  Freedom isn’t about purchasing power or the ability to say and do whatever you want.  Freedom is a peace that is given by the Almighty that no tyrant, no nation, can suppress.  Dietrich Bonheoffer knew real freedom even as the Nazis hung a noose around his neck.  Martin Luther King knew freedom even as he understood his life would be cut short.

“You have to fight back.”  “We need to live separately.”  Over and over I hear these young men utter the same words Dr. King faced from his own community.  Violence, he knew was never the answer.  We are called to be better, to be merciful even when confronted by evil.

And Dr. King provoked anger.  He condemned America’s involvement in Vietnam.  War is never the answer he courageously argued.  Inmates who are confronted each day by violence and “might makes right” just shake their heads in bemused wonder.  “He was so foolish”, they’ll say, and I can’t help but think he was the wisest man alive during my lifetime, a man whose vision of America and the world was so much closer to God’s view than most of our national leaders.

This is not to say he was without faults.  King, like all men and women, had foibles and sins and failures.  But the mark of a man is how he behaves in the worst of circumstances.  In that, King proved himself heroic.

So it was with this year’s MLK Day.  They showed a documentary on his life, his legacy on our internal movie channel.  I noticed many TV sets turned to his story.  A few of the guys came by afterward.  “Did you know all that?” they asked.  I did.  And I gave out my dog eared copy of King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, so a few could read it and understand the message.  It’s always been about the message.

Election Day, Part 1

In July, 1776, delegates from the thirteen break away colonies gathered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to sign their names to a declaration.  From that moment forward the uprising that had begun a year earlier could lead to only one conclusion:  it would be independence or death.

The author of the Manifesto, Thomas Jefferson, borrowed heavily from Scottish political philosopher John Locke when he penned that people “are endowed with certain unalienable rights…”  Jefferson listed three:  life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  The men gathered in Philadelphia, this nation’s founding fathers, understood the importance of the words they were placing their signatures to.  God, not government, gives human beings certain rights.  Freedom, liberty, are God’s dictate, not some privilege that can be handed down by a ruler.

It was a daring statement of faith in the absolute rights of humankind derived from the sovereign Lord.  And, it formed the basis of the most successful experiment in republican democracy the world has ever known.  “We the people…in order to form a more perfect union…”

I write this fifteen days from the presidential election.  Supporters of both candidates will tell you this is the most important election in the nation’s history.  I’m not so sure.   Somehow the crises affecting this country in 1860 when Lincoln was elected, and again in 1864 at his re-election, make this era pale by comparison.

This piece isn’t about Romney or Obama.  This is about voting.  Virginia is one of only four states that do not automatically reinstate voting rights to felons upon their release from prison.  This election day some 350,000 Virginians will be unable to vote solely because they carry a scarlet “F” on their record.  Voting is not a privilege.  It is an unalienable right of a people to have a say in their governance. 

The current Governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, has touted his administration’s efforts to restore voting rights to felons.  He should be applauded.  In less than three years in office, McDonnell has streamlined the process (it is now just filing a simple downloadable form with his office versus the former cumbersome process of petitioning), and restored voting rights to nearly 2,000.  That’s more than any previous modern age Virginia Governor.

The problem is McDonnell, like his predecessors and for too many politicians, believes voting is a privilege and that government can decide the terms and conditions of exercising that privilege.  Disenfranchisement, even after over 225 years, still shows itself each election cycle.

It is an irony not lost on me that this nation, “the shining city on the hill” as former President Ronald Reagan described her, is the only western nation that restricts felons from voting.  Even in this country, all but seventeen states automatically restore voting rights to felons as they exit prison.

Ohio State University law professor Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, a critical assessment of the nation’s mass incarceration push, argues that voting is a fundamental right of citizenship which cannot be usurped by a felony conviction.

And the arguments used to deny felons the right to vote are the same arguments used earlier in this nation’s history to deny women, the poor, and ethnic and racial minorities a say in the future direction of this land.

A few years ago, during George W. Bush’s presidency, this nation became transfixed as we watched millions of Iraqis brave bombings and threats of murder to cast ballots in their first democratic election after the overthrow of the dictator Saddam Hussein.

And we watched as these citizens dipped their fingers in purple ink and displayed them to the world saying “our vote matters”.  I remember one man in particular, carried his child in his arms.  He’d been imprisoned during the Hussein years.  And he proudly walked forward and voted.  “I want my child to know it’s not your past that matters.  It’s your future.”

“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights…”

Amazing words.  It’s a shame this nation, this state doesn’t believe them at election time.