Activists spread awareness about who can vote from behind bars

“I don't really see a way of doing my time without this type of activism and organizing and resistance.”

In November 2008, Corey “Al-Ameen” Patterson was awaiting trial in a Nashua Street Jail cell in Boston watching the first Black man get elected to the nation’s highest office.

“I wish I could vote,” he thought to himself as he watched Barack Obama’s election results pour in on the TV screen.

Years later, Patterson found out he could have voted all along.

“It hit me like a ton of bricks,” he said. “I wasn’t aware of what my rights were.”

Taking effect in November 2001, voting qualifications in Massachusetts were constitutionally amended to exclude currently incarcerated felons, according to the Massachusetts Department of Correction (MADOC).

However, the right to vote is reinstated upon release, and those who are civilly committed, serving time on a misdemeanor, awaiting trial, on probation, or on parole can vote. Patterson was a pretrial detainee at the time of the 2008 election, making him eligible to vote. His lack of awareness has inspired him to make voting in correctional facilities more accessible and to educate other incarcerated individuals about their eligibility.

Approximately 450 incarcerated individuals housed in the 14 institutions overseen by MADOC are eligible to vote, according to data from the department obtained by Boston.com. This number excludes jails and local houses of correction, which hold people awaiting trial and those serving time for misdemeanors, many of whom are also eligible.

Having the right to vote, Patterson said, is about having “a voice in our community.”

“Right now, our community is a prison community,” he told Boston.com. “There’s a lot of things that are wrong with our prison community, and the best way for us to fix it is if we have a voice.”

Mobilizing inside and outside

Patterson started by researching and organizing, becoming a member of the African American Coalition Committee, a group of incarcerated people at MCI-Norfolk dedicated to dismantling systemic racial inequalities.

Patterson, who directs the committee’s voting rights initiative and has been incarcerated since 2009, said he believes that awareness has to “happen first.”

“I can be accountable, but at the same time hold agencies and institutions accountable,” he said.

In a similar vein, the City of Boston announced last month its partnership with local organizations to deliver on-site voting education and outreach to incarcerated voters in the Suffolk County House of Correction and Suffolk County Jail.

“Ensuring that every eligible voter has access to opportunity and resources is critical to ensuring that Boston is a city for everyone,” Mayor Michelle Wu said in a statement.

Joshua “Hamsa” Berrios, another incarcerated individual and member of the committee, said incarcerated people should draw from their own lived experiences and lead the charge by making people aware of their voting rights.

“We are the ones that are being impacted by disenfranchisement,” he told Boston.com. “We should be the ones leading that and voicing that, because of the fact that we’re the ones being impacted by it.”

Advocates in Massachusetts have been pushing to enact voting reforms to increase accessibility in jails and prisons for years. The VOTES Act, signed into law in 2022, aimed to expand voting access for incarcerated individuals, but community organizers say they want to see more action being taken.

“Now that we have the right, the truth of the matter is, there’s no infrastructure in place to exercise that right,” Pastor Franklin Hobbs, founder of the nonprofit Healing Our Land Inc., which serves incarcerated people, told Boston.com. “So we’re looking to build that infrastructure.”

Roadblocks

Many incarcerated individuals do not know what their rights are.

“They’re not aware that they actually have the right to vote,” Hobbs said. “Education is something that we constantly have to do, because people just are not aware.”

The VOTES Act requires that the officer in charge “publish policies and procedures that govern the facilitation of voting and voter registration for eligible voters in the facility.”

Such procedures include posters and written notices with voter education and election information and assisting eligible voters to register and apply for ballots.

Advocates say they have had trouble gaining access to data about incarcerated voting in the past, but new regulations — effective for the 2024 election — require correctional facilities to file a report with the Elections Division regarding their actions taken to facilitate voting access and the number of individuals who applied, received, and returned a ballot.

“If the state is not prioritizing that data collection and data sharing, then we’re going to be in the dark about how effective this whole process is for people who are already most vulnerable at having their votes ignored,” said DeAnza Cook, an assistant professor in the Department of History at the Ohio State University who works with Healing Our Land in Boston correctional facilities.

Identifying eligible voters can also be a challenge, especially because facilities lack the technological infrastructure to systematically determine eligibility in an expedient way, she said.

Where Massachusetts stands

The commonwealth has a long way to go to “be up to par” with some other places in the country, and far too often people who are incarcerated are the “last to be considered,” Cook said.

In Maine, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., felons never lose voting rights, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

A county in Illinois has taken it a step further, opening up jails as polling places for people in the community to vote.

“They’re human beings, just like you and I, and we have the ability to vote and participate in community and democracy,” Cook said. “I’m a firm believer that folks who are more afftected than you and I by the systems that are empowered right now should absolutely have that right as well.”

While he thinks that Suffolk County is “late” to address these voting access issues, Berrios said he respects their strides to do what they can now.

“I think they’re trying to catch up,” he said. “They’re trying to meet this so we’re going to meet them.”

Berrios said he decided to organize around incarcerated voting rights because he wants to “be a part of history.”

“I want to be a part of this historical event when we were to flip it and restore the right to vote for incarcerated people,” he said. “And hopefully Massachusetts will lead that charge.”

Patterson said his “biggest inspiration” for the work he does is “survival.”

“I don’t really see a way of doing my time without this type of activism and organizing and resistance,” he said.

For Patterson, who is from Boston, local legislation is of utmost importance.

“I’m proud of a lot of the work that these elected officials are doing; however, there’s a lot that’s not happening in that legislation,” he said. “And it won’t happen unless the voices of everyone are being heard, and especially the voices of probably the most marginalized community in the state, and that is incarcerated people.”

Patterson and Berrios, who have never voted before, were both convicted of second-degree murder and will be on parole at the time of the upcoming election.

They are both planning to vote.