Since the 1990s, 2 million people with felony convictions have regained the right to vote, thanks to crucial reforms abolishing felony disenfranchisement in 26 states. This election, these voters could play a crucial role—and based on data from 2020, many of them prefer Trump. There’s more to this story however, from incarcerated people’s limited access to information, to the role of prisoners’ race and even positive perceptions of Harris’ gender in shaping incarcerated voters’ preferences. Nicole Lewis, engagement editor for The Marshall Project joins Rattling the Bars to discuss her organization’s findings and insights into the politics of prisoners. Studio / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino Transcript Mansa Musa:  We hear during this period that the most important election ever in the history of elections is getting ready to take place. We hear that if we don’t come out and vote, that Armageddon going to follow if certain people get elected. This is what we are hearing. But for the abolitionists and for prisoners, what do this mean for them? What do this mean for us? What do it mean to say that this is the most important election ever when you are sitting in a cell serving triple life sentences? This the most important election ever, and you are in an environment where the judges have complete control over your livelihood. Joining me today is Nicole Lewis from the Marshall Project to talk about why prisoners are voting for Trump, but more importantly, to give us some insight to the electoral process and electoral assistance as it relates to those of us are on the plantation. Welcome, Nicole. Nicole Lewis:  Thanks for having me on. Mansa Musa:  First, tell our audience a little bit about yourself before we get into the subject matter. Nicole Lewis:  Yeah, absolutely. So, I’m a journalist. I’m an editor at the Marshall Project, and we are a nonprofit news organization that covers the criminal justice system. And typically, our pieces take a systemic look at issues of abuse, harm, wrongdoing, inequality. We use journalism, we tell stories to shine a bright spotlight on where things are not working. And our mission is to create a national sense of urgency about the criminal justice system. Mansa Musa:  OK. And right there. So, as you’ve seen how my intro as it relates to the electoral process and from the abolition, and I’m talking specifically from an abolitionist perspective or from the carceral… We’re not trying to reform prison, we’re not trying to make sanitized prisons, we’re trying to abolish prison. That’s what the abolitionist position is. But in that regard, how do the abolitionists, and this is a question that we’ve been proposing lately, what’s the abolitionist perspective on the electoral process? So, you wrote a piece on why prisoners vote for Trump. So, let’s talk about this, OK. And I’m going to set it up like this here. All right. When I was locked up, I was telling one of my colleagues this. When I was locked up, I was in one institution, and when I was walking around the institution, they had, throughout the institution, vote for Robert Ehrlich. Robert Ehrlich was a Republican that was running for governor in the State of Maryland. And I’m like, why would anybody in their right mind vote for Ehrlich? And so, I’m asking around because the population’s somewhat enlightened. I’m asking around, why are we putting this stuff up here saying vote for Ehrlich? And that’s what they said. They said that a Democrat delegate had went to Ehrlich and asked Ehrlich would he be inclined to pardon lifers or cut life with people that had life sentences, cut their sentences or look at their case? And that was the highest issue for prisoners in the State of Maryland at that time. So, we got a secular interest that’s being represented. And somebody went to a Republican governor, a potential Republican governor saying, would you be inclined to do this? And he said, yeah. And the delegate came back to us and said, this is what he going to do versus what the Democrat governor is doing or has been doing. So, what’s the difference? OK, we saying don’t vote for Trump or why people vote for Trump, but they saying don’t vote for Trump, but vote Democrat. However, the Democrats are in control now. You got Democratic president, vice president running, in some quarters they call it a top cop. So, why wouldn’t people vote for Trump? Come on. Nicole Lewis:  You framed this really perfectly. I think you’re asking all the right questions here. So, let me back up before I truly get into that answer to just give a little bit more context. So, for the last three elections, I’ve run a survey of incarcerated people. It started in 2020. I did one in 2022, and, of course, I did one ahead of this election in 2024. So, this year alone, we heard from 54,000 people across 45 different states, prisons, and 745 facilities across the country. So, this is the largest representation that we have right now of what incarcerated people are thinking about this election. And like you said, it’s been framed in the media as a really consequential and incredibly important election. I think it’s the right question to ask: what does it actually mean for incarcerated people? That’s the intention behind it. For the last six years I’ve been at TNP as a reporter, I’ve covered felony disenfranchisement laws. So, what I’ve seen is the way that states have reconsidered people losing their voting rights when they’re convicted of a felony. And so, it’s really important to know that, since the late 1990s, about 2 million people with felony convictions now have regained the right to vote. And so, that’s mostly people on the outside, that’s people coming home, that’s not necessarily people in prison. So, this is the backdrop under which I’m doing this survey. It’s the first time in 20 years that you’ve got 2 million people with felony convictions who can decide who represents them at all levels of our government. So, when we take a look inside and we ask incarcerated people, mostly in prison who are not eligible to vote, we say, well, who would you pick? Who’s interesting to you? We’ve actually found, time and again, so we saw it in 2020, we see it again here, that many incarcerated people would choose Trump. They would choose him for president. And I think it’s really important to know that, by and large, it’s a lot of white men who are incarcerated who feel very strongly about Trump. Black men somewhat, to some degree, but that survey result is really driven by the white prison population. So, that’s just to start there. Trump has white male supporters behind bars. I don’t actually think that that should be that surprising [laughs]. That tracks what we see. But let me break it down even further. So, when we go and we ask people and we say, well, what is interesting to you about this candidate? Why does he appeal to you? It’s exactly what you’re saying in this previous Maryland race. A lot of people have — Or they have a false understanding, I want to make this really clear because it’s not correct. They have a false understanding that Trump is going to help them get out of prison. And the reason they believe this is because of some of the work that he did with the First Step Act. That was federal. So, it doesn’t apply to people in state prisons. Because of some of the work that he’s done with Kim Kardashian, because of people like Alice Johnson who he was able to get out of prison. But again, by and large our surveys are entirely people in the state system. And so, it’s not actually asking federal people. But it’s this idea that permeates the perception of his policy that he’s going to be good for incarcerated people over the facts. So, people might not have full access to news. They might not be able to watch news on the TV. They might not be able to read it. And so, if you hear someone say, Trump, he’s really good for us, he’s going to get us out, that he’s my shot, of course people are going to say, yeah, no, this is my candidate. This makes sense to us. And so, we’ve seen again and again, like you said, criminal justice issues, getting out of prison, prison reform, abolition to some degree, reentry, release, all of these things are very important to incarcerated people. So, they’re making decisions based on who they think could support them the most. But there’s more to the story. There’s more to the story there. The other thing I think is really important to know is that when Kamala entered the race, when she became the Democratic nominee, we actually saw a surge of support for her. So, a lot of people, particularly Black people who were saying originally that they would vote for Trump in a Trump-Biden race, said that they would now choose the VP. And they’re conflicted about this because a lot of people, we could, again, we could see, and when we followed up with people, we could see people saying, I’m conflicted. She’s a prosecutor. I don’t know what that means in terms of her ability to help me. That seems completely very clear. That seems like her job was putting people away. But they’re so desperate. There’s such clarity that no system, no party, no person, particularly no man has helped them in their situation, that they’re willing to take a gamble on a woman. So, it’s this interesting thing where her identity as a woman is now seen as like, well, maybe she would do something different than what these guys have done and not done for us over many, many years. So, it’s a complex situation where people are working on… Mansa Musa:  And on that note right there, and I agree on the complexities of it, because prison’s not monolithic, and everything is motivated by what’s of interest to them. And I was talking about with one of my colleagues earlier, that the only time we was monolithic in our thinking was from in the early ’60s and to the ’70s, Attica and beyond, where the prison conditions were so horrific that the repression and the brutality forced us into a position where we had to resist. It wasn’t a matter of if you going to resist or you going to die, it’s a matter of resist and possibly live or possibly die, but at least stand and fight. And so, that attitude of being monolithic was right there. We was talking about the conditions of the prison, the way we was living, the way they was feeding us, the way they was clothing us, and the way they was [inaudible] us. When prison, they started reforming the plantation and coming up with different scenarios of getting people out. That’s where the interest became more secular in terms of what’s in it for me? Which leads me to my next question. OK. In your survey, it was established that most people thought that Trump, because the first act is responsible for them getting out. OK. But then look at what’s been taking place for the last four years. Because I’m comparing that against… So when you come to me and say, as a candidate or you saying as a candidate that vote for me, but you don’t have on your agenda nothing about prison reform, you don’t have nothing on your agenda about changing family unification, all those things that’s of interest to me. But I got one example, albeit far-fetched as it might be, that he didn’t do nothing, no more than do a photo op, get somebody out, and he running on the photo op. But I got that as a reference in comparison to what I got from the Democrats. So, how did you survey jails with that? Nicole Lewis:  Yeah, again, such a good question because these are all the issues. So, let me think about where I would start on that. So, I do think that it’s perception over reality for sure. Mansa Musa:  That’s right. That’s right [laughs]. Nicole Lewis:  And I think that an important point to be made here is that when Trump was in power, at the end of his term, he went on an execution spree. He was — Mansa Musa:  Yeah, exactly. Nicole Lewis:  We had a moratorium on executions. And so, he killed people. Well, he said, let’s let these executions go forward. So, I wonder if incarcerated people understood the reality, were really able to engage more deeply with what’s happening, would people still feel this way? Have some more thoughts there. So, that’s one thing. But I will say from what we’ve been looking at and trying to get our heads around both candidates’ policies, both candidates are actually really thin on criminal justice issues right now. There is a lack of clarity on both sides about productive things that people would do. But I will say still, when we stack the policy perspectives up against each other, Trump is much more punitive. He’s really taking a much more punitive approach. He’s really trying to limit any and all kinds of protections, trying to continue to restart the death penalty. So, it’s pretty clear that if, as a president, he would have a very different policy and position. Kamala is sort of still undeveloped. She’s a blank slate. We don’t exactly know what a Kamala presidency means. I think what’s more important for incarcerated people to understand is that the president can only do but so much to affect state policy. And this is really, again, when I’ve covered voting rights, we step back and we say, where could you actually move the needle at the moment? Where does this matter? Why does any of this matter? The president is limited. They mostly oversee the federal system, federal prisoners, they oversee the BOP. Most people are incarcerated in the state system, and it’s the state leadership that basically determines that policy. So, where I think the participation, if you were saying to yourself, I care about this democracy. I want to participate, I want to make my voice heard. If that’s your route, then the midterms become really critical elections. And so, those are elections in which people are more likely to choose their governor. They’re more likely to vote. In some states where judges are elected, they get to vote on judges, sheriffs, district attorneys, city council, state legislature, these folks who actually set the policy and the laws for how the state system is going to work. So, we get so caught up in what’s Kamala going to do for me? What’s Trump going to do for me? And there’s really all these smaller elections where people have much more power to move the needle, to think about reform, to think about releases, to think about improving conditions, to think about how our court system operates. And so, I’ve always said that incarcerated people have really intimate knowledge. You have real clarity about how the system functions. You have real clarity about whether or not states are using their tax dollars appropriately to house people. Are we harming people? Are people getting the rehabilitation help? So, I think that there’s real knowledge that’s locked up. There’s a real understanding of is this working? Is this experiment that we have, is it working? Is it productive? Is it doing anything for anyone? Is it just harmful? So, that’s really what I would say of, I know we pay a lot of attention to what’s Trump or what’s Kamala going to do for me. I would say neither person is going to do much. Trump is objectively, when we compare policy side by side, potentially much more harmful for incarcerated people. But two years from now, in the midterms, it’s really going to be consequential in terms of people’s experiences. Mansa Musa:  And I agree with you on that, because Tip O’Neill, former speaker of the House, said all politics are local. But I had the opportunity to interview some people in Louisiana and they got an organization called Voices of the Educated. And it’s called, it’s VOTE, Voices of the Educated. What they did, going back to your analysis about the impact of local elections, they was able to mobilize the community to vote around the sheriff election. But the way they was able to get traction on it was, they went to everybody that was locked up, still locked up, and the ones that was out that was locked up, that went through the county jail, this particular jail, and said, man, listen, we trying to get rid of these sheriffs. You know what the conditions are in this environment. So, it’s not a matter of not knowing that. So, we are asking you to vote for this person because this person is signed onto our agenda saying that they going to do the necessary things to change the conditions. And they was able to get the sheriff in. And the sheriff did some things and didn’t do other things, because when you dealing with the political aspect of it, you still beholden to your stakeholders, for lack of a better word. But we do get traction and do get changes. And I think that in terms of what you just said, I think the biggest problem is we are enlightened, but we’re not educated on the electoral system as it relates to local politics. Like you say, you can’t go nowhere in prison and not find out, talk to somebody, and they don’t know the judicial system, their appeal procedures. OK, I got my direct appeal, now I got a post convicted, I got a habeas corpus, but I do know these… Or somebody in that system is telling me about these things. But what I don’t know is, and nobody organized me around, is that all the judges on the bench, they come up for elections. You dig what I’m saying? So, as we close out, talk about why you think that we don’t have that kind of attention nationwide. Because like you say, on the federal level, even on the federal level, the president has so much to do. But even beyond that, the Congress, the judiciary, the committees, and the Congress where the people are locally elected, the congressperson, the Senate person, are locally elected, why you think that we don’t have that kind of insight, or why you think that it’s not being mobilized in that regard? Nicole Lewis:  Yeah, no, this is great. I mean, it’s really what you’re talking about here is if people had more clarity, they could come up with a strategy for how they win. They could make decisions. Yes, absolutely. And I would say that in this regard, and incarcerated people are really no different than the rest of the public. Midterm elections tend to be the lowest turnout elections. People just don’t show up. Even though the local officials are the people who are going to make the most influential decisions in their lives. So, there’s really not much difference from people on the outside who blow those off as well. But I think there’s some unique elements to prison. One of the things we always ask in our survey is, how do you get your news? Who do you talk to about this? How would you actually go about educating yourself? And what we’ve seen is that news is extremely controlled, information is extremely censored. So, even if you wanted to, even if you were like, I’m going to figure this out for myself so I can make decisions, you still might be prevented by the administration from accessing the news and information that you would need to have a clear understanding. And we see this again and again. We ask people directly because we know how it works. So, we want to say, well, if you wanted to even understand more about your governor, what would you consult? And people tell us, we’re really cut out. We’re really censored. Newspaper clippings don’t come in. By and large now, many prisons have moved towards scanning mail. So, you can imagine you take a newspaper, you scan it down, you can’t even read it anymore. So, there’s all these systemic barriers that keep people unable to really self-advocate, because information is really that power. So, that’s one component. I think another component is just a little bit about how politics in this country works. The whole news media, we spend a ton of time on the presidential election. A lot of resources go into covering it. And so, I don’t know that we spend the same amount of time actually, as journalists, I’m saying as my industry, scrutinizing district attorneys, scrutinizing judges, sheriffs. I don’t think that they get the same amount of attention. And it’s harder for us as well. So, we actually can’t see… The Marshall Project has done some work in Cleveland where we produced a judge’s guide to help Clevelanders make decisions about these folks. We can’t actually even see into their record fully because we don’t have access to the data. It’s really unclear. So, people in our community are saying, our readers are saying, well, we want to know who’s tough on sentencing? And who sent more Black people? They want to know these. We can’t even truly answer them because of the way data is withheld from the public. It becomes systematically, again, a little bit harder to scrutinize these folks. So, in the long run, they just don’t get the same amount of media attention. So, if you don’t get the media attention, and then media is censored in prison. So, you see how it works. There’s a lack of information. But again, I think that it’s incredibly important for incarcerated people to understand that they have insights about the system that are powerful. That they are deeply informed about an aspect of pretty much every state budget. The most expensive item is the carceral system. So, you’ve got folks who are experiencing it, who have an ability to help the public understand what is not working. And so, I think that when I talk to people, they say, oh, why does it matter? They can’t quite connect what they’ve gone through to how it could be useful in making change. And I say, well, you know something that many people don’t understand. You know something so intimately about what’s broken. I think that’s really powerful. I think that that is enough to say if voting is the route that you want to go, if voting feels important, to take that knowledge and really think about how you’re going to apply it to the system itself. So, whenever I’m reporting on people, I say, well, you know more than many of us, it’s my job here to try to even understand. And I feel like I understand a little, but you understand even more. And I think that alone is really powerful, and it’s something that no one can really take away. No one can contradict that you saw it with your own eyes. Mansa Musa:  Right. And Nicole, you rattled the bars today because, at the end of the day, we look at when those of us that’s on the plantation, we have the insight to how we got there. We have the insight to who controlling it. We have the insight to how to get off of it through a system. I suffer from the apathy when it comes to the electoral process. But at the same token, I recognized after talking to brothers and sisters in Louisiana, looking at DC code, offenders got the right to vote. And like you said, being educated on understanding that this system, electoral system, is not national, it’s local. And there are a lot of the policies and procedures that we’re trying to have impact or effect, we can have impact and affect them through who we put in the office. And on a local level, we can control that because we have numbers. And I think that’s the takeaway for me in this conversation. But you got the last word, Nicole. What you want to tell our audience about this system and some of your upcoming work or what you’re doing now? Nicole Lewis:  Sure. Yeah. I would say right to that point of we’re in a really historic moment for voting rights for people with felony convictions. And so, 26 states and the District of Columbia in the last two decades have reconsidered why we even take away people’s voting rights when they go to prison. That’s a question we have to ask ourselves. And we can see, we can locate that history. For many states, we can see very clearly that felony disenfranchisement was a way to disempower Black communities. This is something that state lawmakers were standing up openly saying at the time, in this period of Reconstruction and Jim Crow. And so, now we’re in a moment, fast-forward, where many states have said, well, we need to redo that. We need to reconsider that. So, it’s now more than ever, people have more access and ability to participate. It doesn’t mean that they always do. It doesn’t mean that it’s a perfect system. The other thing I think people should know is that there’s a pretty aggressive backlash to this expansion of voting rights. So, in several states, Republicans are actively trying to undermine the expansion of voting rights. So, I think it’s a really important moment for people to decide to think about that apathy and really question it and say, is this in my best interest? What can I do? No matter what your politics are. So, as a journalist, I don’t advocate for one party over the other. I don’t advocate for one reform over the other. I’m simply here to provide this information to say you have power, you know something really unique and special. Prison is extremely expensive. So, how you’re treated there really matters. Local actors, local agents, a lot of them you get to vote for. So, you get to decide who wins and who has your interest. And just to question if anyone says there’s one candidate who’s going to be great for you, I would just question that a little bit to say we really want to make sure that we’re making decisions based off of the full facts. And so, we just got to ask deeper, bigger questions about who’s actually good and why. Mansa Musa:  And if our listeners and our viewers want to follow you or get in touch with you, how can they do that? Nicole Lewis:  Sure. Absolutely. So, you can find all of my work at themarshallproject.org, and it’s Marshall with two L’s. Unfortunately, I’m not really on social media, the way that X has gone. But my email’s online at the Marshall Project. I would say some of the next work that I’m working on that we’re trying to think about is, my work is actually very designed to understand some of the needs, issues, interests of incarcerated people and their families, and then we try to figure out how do we make work that reflects. So if people want to email me, it’s just [email protected]. Just tell me what’s important to you, what matters, what you’re seeing. And that’s one way we try to make decisions about what kinds of stories we look into. Mansa Musa:  There you have it. Real News, Rattling the Bars. Nicole rattling the bars today. And she reminds us that, as 2.4 million people are in prison, on the plantation, those of us that have our voting rights restored, is apathy in our best interest when it comes to the electoral process? Is it sitting back, not doing nothing in our better interests? Is it sitting back, vilifying the candidates and saying, have nothing to do with me in our best interest? Or is it, as we heard, becoming more informed about this system and how we can utilize this system to effectively change? Because at the end of the day, we’re the ones that’s sitting behind the doors locked down. At the end of the day, we’re the ones that’s being denied parole. We’re the ones being given harsh sentences. We’re the ones who our families don’t have access to because of a myriad of reasons. And we can change these things if we can change these things. Or are we willing to try to change these things? To utilize this mechanism as a technique as opposed to anything other than that. Thank you, Nicole. I really appreciate you coming on. And we ask that y’all continue to support The Real News and Rattling the Bars because it’s only on The Real News and Rattling the Bars you are going to get someone like Nicole Lewis to come in and educate us on this system, and educate us on all the myths associated with the electoral system and how this is being shaped to get us to look a certain way at certain candidates, as opposed to looking into ourselves and how we can utilize our own strength and our own powers. We ask you continue to do this, and because there’s only one reason we ask, we are actually The Real News.