James Ridgeway

In 1965, James Ridgeway helped launch the modern muckraking era by revealing that General Motors had hired private eyes to spy on an obscure consumer advocate named Ralph Nader. He worked for many years at the Village Voice, has written 16 books, and has codirected Blood in the Face, a film about the far right. In 2012, he was named a Soros Justice Media Fellow.

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Remembering Alex Cockburn

Sharing a column, plenty of arguments, and even more laughs with one of America's sharpest poison pens.

—By James Ridgeway

| Mon Jul. 23, 2012 10:17 AM PDT

Alex Cockburn, 1941-2012

I did not know Alex Cockburn was at the end of the line. While he is now being widely remembered as an iconoclast and a raconteur, what's said less often is that he was also a person of great courage and dignity, and the way he met death was true to himself and to his family.

When we worked together at the Village Voice back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we were the best of friends, and we did our reporting in a way that most people in the press would die for. Nobody censored what we wrote. Nobody messed with how things were written, or dreamed of questioning a political opinion. Rupert Murdoch, when he owned the Voice, was said to gag on some of Alex's pointed epithets, but he never did anything about it. He actually had us both to lunch and offered us a column.

[Read the full article]

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Nearly 6 Million Americans Can't Vote Due to Felon Disenfranchisement Laws

—By James Ridgeway and Jean Casella

| Fri Jul. 13, 2012 2:30 AM PDT

In an updated study released Thursday, the Sentencing Project reports that close to 6 million Americans are now unable to vote thanks to felon disenfranchisement laws. "Approximately 2.5 percent of the total US voting age population—1 of every 40 adults—is disenfranchised due to a current or previous felony conviction," notes the report, authored by Christopher Uggen and Sarah Shannon of the University of Minnesota and Jeff Manza of New York University.

The numbers have risen dramatically over the decades, due both to the rise of mass incarceration in the United States and to the spread of restrictive state voting laws. As we reported last week, nearly all states bar imprisoned felons from voting, 29 states bar them even after they have served their time, and a handful—including several battleground states—effectively bar them for life. The number of affected Americans has ballooned from 1.2 million people in 1976 to 3.3 million in 1996. As of 2010, the figure stands at 5.9 million.

Rates of disenfranchisement vary dramatically by state due to broad variations in voting prohibitions. In six states—Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia—more than 7 percent of the adult population is disenfranchised.

In what amounts to a modern-day version of Jim Crow-era statutes, felon disenfranchisement takes a substantial bite out of the black vote. According to the report, nearly 8 percent of voting-age black Americans (1 in 13) is disenfranchised, compared with roughly 2 percent of their non-black counterparts. In three states—Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia, at least 1 in 5 black Americans will be out of luck come Election Day. In the cases of Florida and Virginia, the numbers are sizeable enough to change the outcome in November. As Desmond Meade of the nonprofit Florida Rights Restoration Coalition put it to us last week: If these people were able to vote, "Florida would no longer be a swing state."

The Mother of All Vote-Suppression Tactics?

Disenfranchisement of former felons could sway the results in November.

—By James Ridgeway

| Thu Jul. 5, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

If the GOP prevails in the Sunshine State on November 6, it won't be because of hanging chads—though there have been plenty of issues with Florida's paperless digital machines. Instead, it might owe something to Gov. Rick Scott's now infamous voter and the restrictive new voting laws Florida passed last year. Or the fact that about a million voting-age Floridians will be sitting on their hands this Election Day—permanently stricken from the voting rolls because they were once convicted of a felony.

Among the GOP's myriad strategies to suppress the vote of people considered more likely to vote Democrat—many of them detailed by Kevin Drum and others in —felony disenfranchisement laws may be the biggest bonanza of all for Republican candidates. The United States incarcerates more of its citizens than another other nation. Some 2.3 million Americans are now in prison or jail, with millions more on parole or probation—together, according to a 2009 study, they account for , most of whom would otherwise be eligible to vote.

Florida leads the pack in the number of citizens excluded. But according to the Brennan Center for Justice, 48 states (exceptions: Maine and Vermont) prohibit current prisoners with felony convictions from voting and 29 of them also bar those on probation or parole. All told, felony disenfranchisement prevents more than from voting. And of the four states that permanently bar voting by former felons—Kentucky, Florida, Iowa, and Virginia—the latter three are battleground states.

The Supreme Court has ruled on the issue twice. In 1974, it determined that denying felons the right to vote was an "affirmative sanction" allowable under the 14th Amendment. A decade later, the justices struck down a provision of the 1901 Alabama constitution that prohibits from voting any individual convicted of "any crime involving moral turpitude"—not because it disenfranchised a large portion of the population, but because the provision reflected "purposeful racial discrimination."

[Read the full article]

Senators Finally Ponder the Question: Is Solitary Confinement Wrong?

—By James Ridgeway, Jean Casella, and Sal Rodriguez

| Tue Jun. 19, 2012 12:58 PM PDT

The ACLU set up this realistic mock solitary cell in the hearing room. Photo: Dolores Panales

The cell placed at the back of the hearing room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building was a pretty accurate replica of a real isolation cell—the kind that exists in supermax prisons and solitary confinement units all over the country. It measured about 7 feet by 10 feet, with a tiny covered window too high to see out of and nothing inside but a bunk and a toilet. The door contained a slot through which a guard slides a food tray; for many prisoners, this represents their only human contact for the day. These are the conditions in which some 80,000 inmates live on any given day in American prisons and jails. They spend at least 23 hours a day in their cells, and some remain in solitary for years or even decades.

More MoJo coverage of solitary confinement:

Solitary confinement in our prisons and jails may be the most pressing domestic human rights problem to which most Americans remain largely oblivious. But today, supporters and foes of the practice descended on Capitol Hill for a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights, convened by subcommittee chairman Dick Durbin. An overflow crowd of some 200 spectators came there to witness—somewhat amazingly—the first-ever congressional hearing on solitary confinement.

Durbin opened the proceedings with a surprisingly strong indictment of solitary confinement as it is practiced in US prisons. The senator, who had visited the notorious Tamms supermax in his home state of Illinois and was apparently much-affected by the experience, called on his colleagues to visit prisons in their states and witness the conditions for themselves. "America has led the way with human rights around the world," Durbin said. But "what do our prisons say about our American values?"

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Smackdown: ACLU Calls Out Private Prison Giant

—By James Ridgeway

| Wed May. 16, 2012 12:09 AM PDT

The American Civil Liberties Union has invited the leader of the nation's largest private prison enterprise, Corrections Corporation of America, to a public debate on the merits of prison privatization.

The organization's May 8 letter to CEO Damon T. Hininger notes that CCA "has repeatedly criticized the views of the ACLU regarding for-profit incarceration. If you truly believe that private prisons are right for our country, we see no reason why you would be unwilling to defend that position in a public debate." The letter, signed by David Fathi, director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project and David Shapiro, a staff attorney, goes on to suggest that Hininger debate Shapiro for 90 minutes "at a mutually agreeable time and public venue."

[Read more in the MoJo blog]