Detainees do their bit for democracy
Sirjerathan Wilson never thought it was worth the trouble to vote and never had. But inside Cook County Jail, Wilson sees it differently: voting is a chance to remind himself that his opinion matters and to show his family that he’s doing more than just letting one day bleed into the next.
‘‘I felt good,’’ said Wilson, 28, who has been locked up on gun charges for seven months. ‘‘I felt like I was doing something right.’’
Wilson is among over 1200 detainees at the county lockup in Chicago doing something new in Illinois and, except for one small pilot at a women’s jail in California, something that may never have been undertaken in any jail in the United States. They are casting their ballots in a polling place set up right inside the jail. A state law enacted last summer requires that Illinois’ 20,000 pretrial detainees be given the opportunity to vote. That means absentee ballots must be distributed in every jail in the state. But the law also requires that any county with more than 3 million residents set up voting machines in the jail. Cook was the only county to qualify.
This is all more than fine with Sheriff Tom Dart, whose office runs the jail that holds about 5500 inmates, 95 per cent of whom are awaiting trial. Dart has gained a reputation for innovation after introducing an inmate-operated pizza kitchen, an inmate-run garden that sells produce to local businesses, and a programme in which inmates help demolish vacant homes. For him, voting is part of a larger effort to create productive citizens.
‘‘The question is, do you want them coming out more damaged and able to do more damage to society, or do you want them to be a benefit to the community?’’ Dart asked. ‘‘What better way to tell people that they matter, that they are relevant and can have a positive impact on their community than saying your voice, your vote, matters?‘‘
With the passage of the detainee voting law, Dart said his goal was to create what he called an ‘‘educated electorate.’’ So, for the last several weeks, educators from nearby DePaul University and Dominican University and others have been coming to the jail to teach voter education classes. At Dart’s request, the city’s public television station prepared brief videos to introduce detainees – the majority of whom have never voted before – to candidates and explain where they stand on issues.
During the first of two weekends of voting at the jail, 1200 detainees cast ballots. Yesterday, the jail was unable to provide a tally for the second weekend.