NAACP Leader: Photo ID Lawsuit Carries on 140 Years of Voting Rights Struggles

With its challenge to Wisconsin’s voter ID law, the NAACP is carrying on a struggle for voting rights that dates back to the post-Civil War era, James Hall, president of the Milwaukee branch of the NAACP, told the Law School’s Mike Gousha and an audience of more than 100 during an “On the Issues” session last week.

Hall, president of the organization since January 2011, emphasized the importance of voting and the long history in America of disenfranchising minorities and low income people by use of rules about voting. “There is so much repeating history,” he said.

The NAACP suit against the law, passed by the Wisconsin legislature in 2011 and requiring people to present an acceptable form of photo identification at the polls, led to a Dane County judge putting a halt to enforcement of the law through a temporary injunction a week ago. More legal action in that suit and other challenges to the law is expected in advance of the statewide election on April 3.

Hall, a practicing lawyer whose NAACP position is unpaid, said there were fewer than 20 prosecutions for voter fraud in Wisconsin in recent years. “Why, all of a sudden, this move to require a photo ID?” Hall said. “Certain types of people don’t have that.” Many of them are African American, he said. “In fact, it is a disenfranchisement law.”

The law was supported generally by Republicans and opposed by Democrats. Supporters said it was a sensible way to reduce chances of voter fraud, while opponents said its practical effect would be to put up barriers to voting for many low income people who don’t have drivers licenses.

Hall told Gousha that the civil rights organization, founded in 1909, remains very relevant. “across the country and particularly here in Milwaukee.” He said the city has some of the largest disparities in the country between African Americans and whites when it comes to income, employment, incarceration, and educational achievement.

Milwaukee and its leaders have not responded with the intensity that is needed to deal with the problems facing many black people in Milwaukee, Hall said. He said, “No, there is not the sense of urgency we would like.” He said the NAACP wants to work together with people from throughout the Milwaukee area in solving problems. “It is in our enlightened self-interest to address these disparities,” he said.

The Eckstein Hall session may be viewed by clicking here.

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James Q. Wilson and Broken Windows Policing

Media coverage of the death of conservative political scientist James Q. Wilson on March 2 correctly identified him as the originator of “broken windows policing” and blithely assumed such policing had been successful. Ross Douthat’s column in the New York Times of March 4, for example, said that Wilsonian policing had resulted in “the low crime rates that have made urban areas from Portlandia to Brooklyn safe for left-wing hipsters and Obama-voting professionals alike.”

The basic premise of “broken windows” policing is that criminals are encouraged when neighborhoods look decayed. However, if police crack down on such things as broken windows, public urination, graffiti, panhandlers, and prostitutes, neighborhood pride is restored and residents are more likely to stand up against crime. Eventually, the theory goes, criminals will get the message and give up their nefarious ways.

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A Tale of Three States, Part 4: The Racial Threat Hypothesis

In the previous post in this series, I highlighted a wide gap in the incarceration rates of Indiana and Minnesota, with Wisconsin in the middle.  The ordering of the three states from highest incarceration rate to lowest corresponds with the ordering from highest rate of violent crime to lowest.  However, for reasons I explained in the previous post, I don’t think  we ought to end our analysis with the simple assertion that high crime drives high incarceration.  For one thing, there is Minnesota: with a crime rate only a little lower than Wisconsin’s, Minnesota has an incarceration rate that is much lower.  There must be other factors at play besides just the crime rate to account for Minnesota’s incarceration rate.  For another, to focus on the crime-incarceration connection begs the question of what drives the very different crime rates of the three states.

In this post, I’ll explore another possible way of accounting for differences in the three states’ incarceration rates, the racial threat hypothesis.  The basic idea is this: a larger racial minority population causes the majority to feel more threatened by the minority and consequently to prefer to stronger social control measures.

Here are the relevant numbers from Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota:

IN

  WI

  MN

Black Population (2010)

591,397

359,148

274,412

Blacks as Percentage of Total Population (2010)

9.1%

6.3%

5.2%

Imprisonment Rate (2010, per 100,000)

459.9

387.2

177.8

 

As you can see, the incarceration-rate order tracks the order based on the size of the each state’s black population.

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