Criminal offenders in the United States typically forfeit voting rights as collateral consequences of their felony convictions. This paper presents the first systematic analysis of the origins and development of these felon disfranchisement provisions across the states. Because such laws tend to dilute the voting strength of racial minorities, we build on theories of group threat to test whether racial threat influenced their passage. Our event history analysis shows that the rate of adoption peaked in the late 1860s and 1870s, the period when extending voting rights to African Americans was most ardently contested. Consistent with one version of the racial threat thesis, we find that large nonwhite prison populations increase the risk of passing restrictive laws, even when the effects of time, region, economic conditions, political partisanship, population, and punitiveness are statistically controlled. These findings are important for understanding restrictions on the civil rights of citizens convicted of crime, and more generally for the role of racial conflict in American political development.

Universal suffrage is a cornerstone of democratic governance. As levels of criminal punishment have risen in the United States, however an ever-larger number of citizens have lost the right to vote. The authors ask whether felon disenfranchisement constitutes a meaningful reversal of the extension of voting rights by considering its political impact. Data from legal sources, election studies, and inmate surveys are examined to consider two counterfactual conditions: (1) whether removing disenfranchisement restrictions alters the outcomes of past U.S. Senate and presidential elections, and (2) whether applying contemporary rates of disenfranchisement to prior elections affects their outcomes. Because felons are drawn disproportionately from the ranks of racial minorities and the poor disenfranchisement laws tend to take more votes from Democratic than from Republican candidates. Analysis shows that felon disenfranchisement played a decisive role in U.S. Senate elections in recent years. Moreover at least one Republican presidential victory would have been reversed if former felons had been allowed to vote, and at least one Democratic presidential victory would have been jeopardized had contemporary rates of disenfranchisement prevailed during that time.

T his multi-method paper presents a model of individual and contextual variation in commutation, a form of clemency that lessens the severity of criminal sentences. In the contemporary US context of high incarceration, commutation is one of few "back-end" mechanisms available for early release. We first describe national trends, showing a significant decline in commutation releases, as well as great geographic variation. We then test whether commutation decisions reflect consistency or compensation with other forms of punishment. Our mixed-effects lo-git analysis reveals state-level compensation (greater commutation in more punitive states) but individual-level consistency (greater commutation for more advantaged groups). Commutation is most likely for those presenting a "mercy package" of White race, female sex, and less violent criminal histories. In contrast, Black men convicted of violence are exceedingly unlikely to be commuted. Nevertheless, qualitative evidence suggests that the apparent "female advantage" in commutation may reflect differences in the nature of the underlying offense and subsequent prison behavior. These results both parallel and extend sociological research on punishment, pointing to commutation as an understudied and underutilized mechanism for mercy.

Despite the proliferation of transitional justice, scholars have rarely researched the emotional toll on those who implement transitional justice mechanisms. This article accordingly examines the emotion management techniques employed by eighty-five judges who served in Rwanda's post-genocide gacaca courts. Most of the intrapersonal and inter-personal emotion management strategies we find are gendered, with men generally emphasizing strength and women underscoring empathy and understanding. Moreover, the dimensions of identity that were most salient during the conflict also shaped the judges' interpersonal emotion management strategies. Specifically, judges who were not targeted during the genocide focused on regulating emotions tied to punishing defendants, while judges who were targeted emphasized survivors' emotional catharses. As such, our findings show how conflict divisions and gender norms structure the expression of emotion during transitional justice processes.