By Liz Miranda, Chrissy Cassa, and Al-Ameen Patterson
For more than 200 years, imprisoned residents in Massachusetts were eligible to vote. Then, in 1997, a coalition of incarcerated people began organizing and distributing materials about how their elected officials were voting on prison and jail issues.
The day after these citizens announced they would form a Political Action Committee (PAC) to support these efforts, then-acting Governor Paul Cellucci announced his support for a constitutional amendment to disenfranchise them. As a result, democracy in Massachusetts is less accessible to incarcerated residents today than it was when both Jim Crow laws and chattel slavery were legal institutions in the United States.
As we’ve seen with mandatory sentencing for drug offenses and marijuana legalization, public opinion changes and mindsets grow. Now is the time for Massachusetts to revisit this mistake.
Back in the 1990s, even as national politics focused heavily on mass incarceration and the War on Drugs, a mention of inmate voting rights here in Massachusetts would’ve garnered nothing more than a shoulder shrug. It’s hard to find news coverage or historical reference to opposition or protests against inmates’ right to vote.
Voting from prison was commonplace and, to corrections administrators, common sense. They saw first-hand how civic engagement programs helped rehabilitate incarcerated individuals, maintain safety within prisons, and curb recidivism. On average, about 85 percent of people in prison in Massachusetts will be released back into their communities.
“Research shows voting is correlated with an increased sense of personal responsibility, successful reentry and boosted community connections, and a reduced likelihood of reoffending,” states Bob Libal, senior campaign strategist with The Sentencing Project. Prison-based voting is rehabilitative and beneficial to long-term community safety.
Before 2000, incarcerated individuals in Concord were excited to receive their absentee ballots.
“It made me feel empowered and a part of society. It gave me a voice. I wasn’t just interested in prison issues but social and elderly issues that affected my aging parents and my son,” says Richard Johnston, who was incarcerated at Concord prison when the right to vote was narrowed. Political engagement of incarcerated citizens helped boost voter turnout beyond prison walls as conversations with family members and friends encouraged more people to head to the polls, creating a positive feedback loop of civic participation that has been cut off for two-and-a-half decades.
Many legislators, including a co-author of this article, state Sen. Liz Miranda, have been inspired by the civic engagement of prison-based groups like the African American Coalition Committee (AACC). The AACC motivated me to champion the jail-based reforms that became law in 2022 with the passage of the VOTES Act, which expanded voting access for those held pretrial or convicted of misdemeanors.
This session, Sen. Miranda filed S.524, an Act Relative to Voting Rights Restoration. On Oct. 14, 2025, this bill made history as the first of its kind since 2000 to be reported favorably out of the Election Laws Committee. If passed, all incarcerated citizens 18 years or older would once again be able to participate in US presidential elections as well as municipal elections in their hometowns.
Bill S.524 currently sits before the Senate Ways and Means Committee. Recent polling shows strong public support for reform—most notably among 18-to-29 year-olds. Seventy-six percent of people polled in this age group, those that were either not alive or too young to vote in 2000, support restoring voting rights to incarcerated individuals with felony convictions.
This legislation will not be difficult to implement. The systems are already in place: absentee ballots are currently used in jails for citizens awaiting trial and were used for years in our prisons prior to 2000. The Department of Corrections already has policies governing incarcerated voting—implementation would require no new technology, equipment or security infrastructure. Moreover, most municipalities would see few, if any, additional voters.
Incarceration in Massachusetts is highly concentrated, with nearly half of all prison admissions coming from just 15 percent of the state’s census tracts, primarily in neighborhoods in Brockton, New Bedford, Fall River, Lowell, Boston, Worcester, and Springfield.
Predominantly Black and Latino, these communities already bear the brunt of deep social and economic inequities, with incarceration and disenfranchisement further compounding the problem. Nearly 60 percent of the approximately 8,000 people disenfranchised due to felony convictions are Black and Latino, further evidence that felony disenfranchisement functionally disenfranchises Black and Brown communities and reduces our voice in the political process.
In an era when democratic institutions are increasingly under attack, Massachusetts has the opportunity to send a strong message that we stand by the universal right to vote. This was the case for more than 200 years, when incarcerated voting made prisons safer, the community stronger, increased political engagement within the public, and most importantly—respected the core belief that democracy means everyone.
Sen Liz Miranda is a Democratic member of the Massachusetts State Senate, representing the Second Suffolk District. Boston native Corey “Al-Ameen” Patterson is vice-chair of the African American Coalition Committee (AACC) at MCI-Norfolk. Chrissy Cassa is the legislative organizer for Empowering Descendant Communities to Unlock Democracy, a joint initiative of AACC, Healing Our Land, Inc., and the Democracy Behind Bars Coalition.
