Dear Friends,

In the midst of this election year it is important to remind ourselves that a group of five million Americans will not be on the voter rolls this year. This is not necessarily due to their lack of interest in the election, but because these people have had a felony conviction which disqualifies them from participation.

Since the late 1990s there has been a surge of policy reform activity around the country. Two dozen states have enacted various policy and practice reforms designed to either scale back the number of persons disenfranchised or remove some of the barriers to rights restoration.

Along with this movement has come a new generation of scholarship on the issue of felony disenfranchisement. A wealth of studies and analyses have been produced in recent years that examine disenfranchisement from a variety of perspectives – law, social science, history, and journalism. Overall, these writings provide new estimates of the statistical impact of disenfranchisement, assess legal and moral perspectives on the policy, and place the issue in a comparative international context.

I’m pleased to let you know of our new publication, Felony Disenfranchisement: An Annotated Bibliography, which provides an overview of more than 80 journal articles and books on felony disenfranchisement over the past two decades. We hope that it will prove useful to policymakers, scholars, journalists, and others engaged in examining this fundamental issue of democratic participation.

Sincerely,

Marc Mauer