Last month, while researching for this column, I learned that veterans are a protected class in the United States, just like people of color, just like people with disabilities. That is to say, it is illegal to discriminate against someone because of their identity as a veteran.
Perhaps it’s natural, then, that my thoughts turned to a class that enjoys no protections at all — an identity that shares our tax burden, but, in some cases, cannot vote in the United States: the incarcerated populations. (People who are incarcerated for felonies in all but two states cannot vote, and the bureaucratic hurdles around voting while incarcerated often get in the way of incarcerated populations being able to exercise their right to vote.).
To get more insight. I talked to Hannah Young, the associate director of the American Prison Writing Archives, which aims to collect, preserve, and highlight the first-hand experiences, or witness accounts, of incarcerated people. The archive resides at Johns Hopkins University’s Sheridan Libraries, and which is available online, and has big plans for the future, among them expanding the archive itself and its visibility and compensating authors of these testimonies for their work. Ultimately, the archive hopes to influence policy by making these witness accounts —, and the ones it hopes to collect in the future —, readily
