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1 in 3 chance of being imprisoned at some point in his lifetime, while a white male has
only a 1 in 17 chance of going to prison.

The United States is one of only a handful of countries that bar prisoners from voting.
Furthermore, people convicted of felonies in most U.S. jurisdictions are stripped
permanently of their right to vote in local, state, and federal elections. Because of this,
some critics argue that inequalities in the justice system contribute to political inequality
by disenfranchising large groups of people, primarily minority men. At any one time, more
than 4 million Americans—or 1 in 50 adult citizens—are ineligible to vote due to a past
criminal conviction. Of those, 1.4 million are black men, comprising 14 percent of the
nation’s black male population.4 Recently, however, following years of advocacy by civil
liberties and prisoner rights organizations, a number of states have restored voting rights
and other civil rights to former prisoners.
Capital Punishment. Federal law permits the imposition of the death penalty for certain
violent crimes and treason. Capital punishment is legal in 38 states as well. Since colonial
times, about 13,000 people have been executed in the country.
The death penalty was widely used in the United States until the twentieth century, when it
began to be considered inhumane. In Furman v. Georgia (1972), the U.S. Supreme Court
suspended use of the death penalty, ruling that because of the variation in state laws and
the wide discretion given to judges and juries in its application, capital punishment was
“arbitrary and capricious” and therefore unconstitutional under the Eighth and Fourteenth
Amendments. In a series of cases in 1976, the court reversed itself and permitted use of
the death penalty for specified crimes and with appropriate procedures.
Death penalty cases are now conducted using bifurcated trials in which juries must first
determine defendants’ guilt or innocence and then, in a second stage, consider mitigating
and aggravating circumstances in deciding whether to recommend a death
sentence.5 Since 1976, more than 1,050 death sentences have been carried out. Some
3,370 people are currently on death row nationwide, although only about 10 percent of
death-row inmates are ever executed.
The United States is unusual among democracies in permitting capital punishment. Most
European and Latin American states have abolished the death penalty, although
Guatemala, many Caribbean nations, and some African and Asian democracies retain it. In
undemocratic countries the death penalty is common but not universal. In 2005 at least
80 percent of executions recorded worldwide took place in China, which reported
executing 1,770 people (Amnesty International estimates that the actual number of
Chinese executions might have been as high as 8,000).6 Iran reported 94 executions in
2005, and Saudi Arabia at least 86, while the United States executed 60 people.
U.S. courts have proscribed capital punishment for criminals with a diminished mental
capacity. In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled in Atkins v. Virginia that executing mentally
retarded criminals violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual
punishment. In the ruling, the court affirmed that the Eighth Amendment should be
interpreted in light of the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a
maturing society.” The justices cited the fact that a growing number of state legislatures
had banned execution of the mentally retarded as evidence of a shift in the national
consensus on the matter.
In the 2005 case Roper v. Simmons, the Supreme Court again used the “evolving
standards of decency” test to limit the use of the death penalty, holding that capital

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