The emergence of an African American and Latino-dominated coalition with the potential to reconfigure American government and politics at the national, state, and local levels is one of the most noteworthy developments in U.S. politics over the past two decades. Racialized mass incarceration and felon disenfranchisement are impediments to this coalition’s political power. Social scientists, legal scholars, and activists have long paid attention to how devices like poll taxes, English competency tests, voter intimidation, racial gerrymandering, and voter identification laws restrict participation and diluted the political influence of racial and ethnic minorities. This essay seeks to direct renewed scholarly attention to racialized mass incarceration and felon disenfranchisement as similar devices for suppressing and containing minority group political power.
