On Oct. 1, 1979, Allan Lawson, executive director of the Philadelphia-based Prisoner Rights Council, was crestfallen. Only a small number of incarcerated people in the city’s biggest county jail, Holmesburg Prison, had exercised their newfound right, granted in 1973 by the U.S. Supreme Court, to register to vote. An investigation revealed that detainees were more concerned about overcrowding than voter registration. Crucially, many had been detained simply because they were too poor to make bail or because of minor and arbitrary parole violations.
While this story may seem unimportant in 2020, amid far more widespread barriers to voting, it points to a quiet but egregious form of ongoing voting suppression — pretrial detention in county jails.
Today, close to half a million people in the United States are imprisoned in county jails before trial — when they are still presumed innocent under the law. Many people held pretrial are there solely because they cannot afford bail; others are there because of probation or parole violations — often as minor as missing curfew — that result in detention without bail. Because of racialized bail-setting patterns inherent in the wide discretion given to judges, people of color disproportionately languish in pretrial detention, which many argue criminalizes individuals simply for being Black and/or poor. The historical struggle by the PRC to secure and implement voting rights for unsentenced detainees exposes how pretrial detention has tremendous ramifications for American democracy.
In the fall of 1971, people detained at Holmesburg wanted to register to vote — specifically so they could vote against the tough-on-crime, notoriously racist former police commissioner Frank Rizzo, who was running for mayor. But the Pennsylvania election code prohibited registrants from going to the prison or sending absentee ballots there.
The detainees sued, and after several setbacks the city finally agreed to a consent decree that granted all pretrial detainees in Philadelphia the right to register and vote in all federal, state and local elections — though only after the Supreme Court ordered a lower court to rehear the case.
Although this was a major victory, actual implementation of the decision was far from seamless. The County Board of Elections and prison administrators immediately began undermining the consent decree.
As efforts began to register imprisoned people for the May 1974 primary, the prison did not alert them about Registration Day, despite being mandated by the consent decree to do so. Many jailed people thus missed the opportunity to register. Making matters worse, those who had already registered before being detained were not given ballots. And then the city “forgot” to conduct an election in its prisons. When a court ordered that the city hold another election day for prisoners, election officials did so only at one facility, Holmesburg, rather than all three as the consent decree required.
Not surprisingly, then, only 41 ballots got collected, even though 200 completed ballot applications purportedly had been turned in.
Despite the PRC’s best efforts to circulate information about detained people’s voting rights via local radio and pamphlets, the following year’s voting process was equally problematic. A PRC report on voter registration in April 1975 — notably, Rizzo’s mayoral reelection year — contended that Philadelphia’s jailed people were “not receiving maximum opportunity to both register and apply for absentee ballots,” because the prison administration “too tightly” controlled the registration sites and the movement of people within the institution.
Detained people also reported vague and infrequent announcements about registration. At Detention Center, for example, the public address system was defective and could not be heard in cell blocks. Additionally, none of the announcements were in Spanish, in clear violation of the consent decree. The PRC also cited numerous incidents of illegal interference in the voting process by correctional officers, who prevented some imprisoned people from voting. On the second registration day, for example, two correctional officers “outright prohibited” PRC representatives from entering Holmesburg to provide oversight.
Election Day was no better. Even though more than 200 people had registered, 72 of them had been moved from their original place of imprisonment, leading to “utter chaos” that made it difficult to track down and collect their ballots. While the movement of people in and out of county jails is common, 27 of the 72 were actually still in Philadelphia’s prison system. But “inadequate cooperation” from prison administrators to locate them, the PRC reported, probably “resulted in some people being disenfranchised.”
In the years that followed, the challenges faced by detained people and their advocates at the PRC only multiplied. Prison administrators repeatedly blocked candidates from visiting the prisons, leading the PRC to take legal action, because with access to information limited in prisons, receiving campaign literature and hearing directly from candidates were vital to exercise the right to vote in an informed way.
These obstacles resulted in a racialized barrier to voting. Since the late 1960s, Philadelphia’s jail population had skyrocketed and become over 80 percent Black, despite African Americans being only 33 percent of the city’s population. “The voting strength of Philadelphia’s Black communities is severely weakened and fragmented when too many Blacks are caged in Pennsylvania’s jails and prisons,” the PRC wrote in one of its pamphlets on voting rights distributed to jailed people.
That the majority of Philadelphia’s growing pretrial detainee population was Black shows how, despite the elimination of Jim Crow-era voting restrictions with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, anti-Black barriers to voting remained alive and well, thriving in the less visible and largely ignored corners of the country’s county jails.
The tireless efforts of the PRC produced some success in overcoming the hurdles placed in front of pretrial detainees in Philadelphia who wanted to vote. In 1978, 750 detained people registered for absentee ballots — a dramatic increase from the 41 ballots only four years earlier.
This success, however, was short-lived. For the spring 1979 primaries, the PRC discovered that at least 105 people across the city’s prisons “lost their right to vote” because they never received their absentee ballots, despite registering. The County Board of Elections could have notified registrants that the ballots had been denied and sought the information needed to accept the registration — but chose not to.
Canceling ballots over technicalities is not a new problem. It happened to dozens of people detained at Holmesburg. Yet, because it occurred within the prison walls, it escaped broader notice.
The struggle to overcome hurdles to voting imposed by prison administrators and the County Board of Elections soured detained people on voting, especially since they lost faith that voting could solve their biggest problems — the overcrowded and abusive conditions of their confinement.
The history of voting rights in Philadelphia jails suggests that detaining people pretrial — a practice that numerous studies show is harmful and not necessary to ensure attendance at trial — compromises these citizens’ legal right to vote. A system controlled by sheriffs and superintendents with discretionary power over the voting process is incapable of securing the right to vote.
Because the pretrial population is disproportionately non-White, this kind of “de facto disenfranchisement” constitutes an abhorrent form of racist voter suppression, despite rarely gaining the headlines and outrage that long voting lines do. But jailed people are human beings with rights — members of our families and communities. They are being held in unsafe and inhumane conditions with few avenues for making their grievances meaningfully heard. This racialized barrier to voting makes it even harder by skewing our elections and preventing issues related to the overincarceration of people of color from receiving adequate attention from policymakers.