Does support for ex-felons right to vote divide along party lines?
No, this isn’t a partisan issue. In Rhode Island in 2006, a Republican state representative spoke on our behalf in the legislature and helped to get the bill passed. Last year the Republican governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, issued a decree giving ex-felons the right to vote. When did you decide to turn things around for yourself? In prison I kept seeing people in the library, reading the newspaper. They invited me to join them. It took me a couple of years, but I did. What struck me was that these inmates read the entire newspaper from front to back, then had long conversations about the news. Also, I had always liked literature, so I read novels – Dickens, Tolstoy, all the great authors. I became a GED tutor. One of my students, a Laotian man, told me I made everything easy to understand. That meant a lot to me. One day I was watching a Spanish news station in the prison lounge, and it showed a young man swimming across the Rio Grande from Mexico to the United States. But he never
