This book is a must-read in order to understand the workings of liberal democracy in the United States. Taking as his starting point the exclusion of 5.3 million citizens (including those held in prison and on probation and parole) from the basic right to exercise citizenship through the vote, Andrew Dilts clearly and compellingly demonstrates how felon disenfranchisement as a form of punishment functions in the American political system: It is used to police the internal boundaries of membership while helping reproduce the structure of white supremacy that imprints democracy under conditions of mass incarceration. With rigorous argumentation and political passion, Punishment and Inclusion invites its readers to reflect critically on a political apparatus of coercive and racialized exclusion that is taken for granted by the body politic at large.
The book is animated by two interrelated objectives: first, to show how felon disenfranchisement works, or to pursue the question of what its theoretical and material effects are, and second, to read felon disenfranchisement as a “symptom” of the underlying theoretical and political contradictions of a liberalism that justifies and sustains it. Dilts then combines these two threads of analysis in a “case study” of Maryland, which provides a concrete and lively illustration of the book’s arguments.
In keeping with the first goal, Dilts devotes Chapters 1 and 2 to a genealogy of the figure of the “felon,” in order to explicate how this subject is “fabricated” by the very practice—disenfranchisement—that ostensibly takes its justification from it and works through it. This genealogy, which points to the way that subjects are produced through practices of power and knowledge that take them as their object, is not only inspired by Michel Foucault’s practice of writing theory through the genealogical method but also integrally informed by his famous analysis of the emergence of the modern prison. It will be recalled that an important argument Foucault makes in Discipline and Punish (1975) is that the figure of the “delinquent” is a product of the prison, whose success and continuity as an institution paradoxically lies in its failure to fulfill its “rehabilitative” purpose. In a parallel fashion, Dilts describes how the figure of the felon is a product of disenfranchisement, which works by constructing the felon as permanently marked with a criminal identity, rather than as the subject responsible for criminal actions, and, therefore, as dangerous and unworthy to take part in political membership. The disqualification from the vote on the basis of a criminal identity is then continually reproduced by voting practices and other exclusions that are applied to felons.
Attentive to the changes that arise historically, Dilts also examines the new meanings that the felon takes on with the reconfiguration of the discourses that produce it. Building on a thoughtful reconstruction of Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics and governmentality, the author argues that the further the American prison system moves from the rehabilitative ideal, the more it turns to regulating crime on a more systemic level, not as something to be overcome but as something to be “managed.” Thus, the prison system, by being kept at a socially acceptable rate and with the overarching concern of public safety rather than punishment, leads to the construction of disenfranchisement as “collateral damage.” In this register—much more biopolitical than disciplinary—the felon is reconfigured as a “homo œcononomicus,” with full responsibility at the same time it is constructed as a subject at once “dangerous, pathological, and monstrously associated with crime, blackness, and unworthiness” (p. 79), a subject that is beyond rehabilitation and, therefore, deserving of political exclusion.
Having shown how felon disenfranchisement produces the “felon” both theoretically and materially, Dilts turns in Chapters 3 and 4 to address the book’s second goal, namely, to elucidate what voting restrictions reveal about the contradictions of liberalism as found in its Lockean formulation and in the specific history of American democracy. He provides a provocative reading of Lockean liberalism, focusing on the figure of the thief that can be put to death in order to argue that punishment plays not a marginal or inconsistent role but a constitutive one in Locke’s discourse (p. 87). He reveals how Locke creates the criminal subject as the irrational, dangerous, subhuman corollary of the obedient subject who is rational, law abiding, innocent, and, thus the proper member of the commonwealth, disclosing how punishment is utilized to determine the boundary of political membership.
A critical discussion of Judith Shklar’s important analysis of American citizenship complements the analysis of the illiberal foundations of Lockean liberalism. Through an excavation of the “blind spot” of Shklar’s theorization of “citizenship as standing” (p. 135), Dilts contends that the exclusions specific to American democracy are based not only on the history of slavery (which Shklar perceptively acknowledges) but also on the appropriation of the practices of slavery by the practices of punishment, by forced prison labor as well as the racialization of the criminal justice system at large. Hence, even though Shklar recognizes the centrality of the legacy of slavery in the denial of the vote as a means to confer standing on those who can vote, she misses how this legacy continues to undermine the achievement of universal suffrage through felon disenfranchisement and the racialization of citizenship.
Chapters 6 and 7 shift gears and turn to Maryland to illustrate the arguments of the book more concretely. Dilts uses the discourse analysis of Maryland’s constitutional debates around voting exclusions to explain how the “felon” becomes operative through the figure of the “free negro” at the intersection of race, criminality, and disability. Here, not only do we see how the constructs of this subjectivity change over time, moving from a disciplinary to a regulatory problematic, but we also learn how its racialized construction gets tangled up with a moralizing and ableist vocabulary, one that imputes innocence and worthiness at the same time that it defines mental competence (p. 198). Portraying how the exclusion of felons works hand in hand with the exclusion of the mentally impaired, Dilts exposes the naturalization of these exclusions as constitutive features of American citizenship built on white supremacy. The book concludes with a call for moving away from an essentialist categorization of the felon, building on Iris Young’s concept of seriality and a discussion of political ethics of Beauvoirian inspiration to question the desirability of freedom that is based on constitutive exclusions.
Overall, this is a very important work in political theorization, at once theoretical and political. It innovatively weaves together broad literatures, such as discipline and governmentality, liberalism, and critical race and disability studies, which are all read through the revealing lens of felon disenfranchisement. It further brings the sophisticated theoretical insights of these literatures to bear on a specific instantiation of felon disenfranchisement in the interesting case of Maryland, though a more explicit discussion of the exemplarity of Maryland would have been helpful (p. 268 n. 3). With cogent argumentation, Dilts makes a convincing case that we cannot think citizenship, especially in its liberal incarnation, without also thinking punishment. Only when these two pillars of American democracy are analyzed together can we begin to get a sense of how deeply race permeates its basic premises and how racialized exclusions are reproduced through naturalized constructions of criminality and their broader effects. These theoretical conclusions highlight the book as a political intervention that seeks to denaturalize precisely what is taken for granted. While the book calls for the abolition of felon disenfranchisement, it is not naive. It is clear that the work of combating the racial order cannot be limited to eliminating voting restrictions, even though it would be a crucial step in that direction.
What is surprising about the book, however, is how little space it allows for the resistance of the subjects whose production it skillfully charts. Except for brief references to organizations that advocate on behalf of the disenfranchised and the positive effects of the Civil Rights movement on decreasing lifelong ex-felon disenfranchisement, resistance first enters the discussion in the conclusion (p. 215) and then, in the coda that makes up the last few pages of the manuscript (pp. 225–28). As such, it feels like an afterthought. The many individuals who are captured by the prison system appear only as passive objects, with little voice of their own. This leads the work to a certain functionalism, in which the convincing account of the discursive construction of the criminal and citizen subjects is approached only by means of the roles they play in perpetuating the structures of domination that bring them into being, without attention to how they react back upon them, how they upset, disrupt, and challenge them. The way the genealogy of the felon gives a historical perspective that portrays the contingency of what has become naturalized is commendable, but the emphasis on contingency is occluded when it comes to the possibility of destabilizing and upending racial structures of exclusion by way of the political struggle of those most subjected to these exclusions.
This reservation, however, is not meant to overshadow the merits of the book. Punishment and Inclusion is a sophisticated response to all those who think that felon disenfranchisement is simply an exception to an otherwise color-blind liberal democracy. It will be indispensible reading for anyone who wants to understand the subtle mechanisms of the “color line” and how it is maintained and reproduced in the United States.
