Voter Registration and Jail-Incarcerated Women: Are Justice-Involved Women Civically Engaged?

Abstract

Civic engagement, like the broader phenomenon of social engagement, seems out of keeping with the alienating ethos of incarceration. We sought to learn which demographic and contextual factors predicted one form of civic engagement, voter registration, in a jail-incarcerated female population. A 158-item survey was administered to 261 adult women incarcerated in three Midwestern jails, September 2014 to March 2016, as part of a parent intervention study for cervical cancer prevention. Chi-square comparisons between a voter registered and a non-registered group yielded significant differences in five demographic and social context indicators, and a model for voter registration was estimated using multiple logistic regression. Total time incarcerated, having personal health insurance, being stably housed, and identifying as a Black woman contributed significantly to voter registration. We suggest that in a justice-involved group the community’s facilitation of access to basic resources may trigger a reciprocal engagement in civic life, and we speculate that Black women may find belonging and motivation for engagement in resilient, long-standing sources outside official institutions. Our findings support the notion that meeting the basic needs of individuals post-incarceration can create healthier, more engaged communities.

With 11.7 million jail admissions every year and two million people in prison, the United States incarcerates its citizens at higher rates than nearly any other country in the world (Minton & Golinelli, 2014; Wacquant, 2010). Some urban communities are so aggressively policed that for many who live in them supervision by law enforcement and the courts describes a prominent feature of day-to-day existence (Goffman, 2014). Even with current efforts to reduce prison populations or shift sentencing from incarceration to community corrections (Phelps, 2013), the number of U.S. citizens who carry the mark of an arrest record or incarceration is staggering. A U.S. Department of Justice report found that in 2016 the states and territories had on file 70 million criminal history records (unique to individuals by fingerprint and shared through a centralized data bank) (Goggins & DeBacco, 2018). Citizens of such a polity risk coming to be defined more by their interactions with systems of surveillance, discipline, and control and less by the roles and activities of civic participation that characterize socially integrated, participatory democracies (Clear, 2007; Phelps, 2013; Wacquant, 2010). In this article, we report on results from a secondary analysis of data gathered during a health promotion study with women in three urban jails in the Midwest United States. While implementing the parent study (2014–2016), we became aware of a perception held by many of the women that they had lost their eligibility to vote due to their criminal justice involvement. We became curious to know what elements of the women’s individual and social contexts might predict voter registration in this arguably civically marginalized group.

BACKGROUND

Social and Civic Engagement and the Context of Incarceration

To be socially engaged means to participate in social relationships and activities and to conceive of oneself as part of a group that in turn provides one with a sense of meaning and place. The literature on social engagement is sizable, a good part of it demonstrating documented connections to mental and physical well-being (Berkman, Glass, Brissette, & Seeman, 2000; Lam et al., 2016; Umberson & Montez, 2010; Ware, Hopper, Tugenberg, Dickey, & Fisher, 2007). Civic engagement is a more narrowly defined concept that refers to participation in civic activities such as volunteering, attending public meetings, joining with neighbors to address shared public concerns, joining political or issue campaigns, registering to vote, and voting (National Conference on Citizenship, 2011). A person who is civically engaged is integrated into networks and activities in which some aspect of governance or promotion of the public welfare is the focus (Arvanitidis, 2017; Blakely, Kennedy, & Kawachi, 2001; National Conference on Citizenship, 2011).

Both social and civic engagement stand at odds with incarceration, a primary purpose of which is to separate offenders from the community. For women and men who are incarcerated, the resulting disruption in roles, responsibilities, and relationships can lead to social alienation or exclusion (Uggen, Manza, & Behrens, 2013). In some cases, the experience of incarceration may amplify determinants that put women on a pathway to criminal justice involvement in the first place (Kelly et al., 2014). Indeed, the pathways to crime model postulates that many women who come to be involved in the criminal justice system do so after experiencing persistent poverty, low educational attainment, psychosocial trauma from abuse and violence, substance use, and mental illness—any or all of which may position women on the margins of civic life (DeHart, Lynch, Belknap, Dass-Brailsford, & Green, 2014; Grella, Lovinger, & Warda, 2013). Social exclusion in general has known consequences for health, including a main effect through psychological states that facilitate well-being and indirect effects through stress buffering and enhanced coping (Berkman et al., 2000; Cohen, 2004; Lam et al., 2016; Umberson & Montez, 2010). Researchers have linked social exclusion to a range of physical and mental health deficits (Bath & Deeg, 2005; Holt-Lunstad, Smith, & Layton, 2010; Jenkinson et al., 2013; Pleace & Quilgars, 2013; Umberson & Montez, 2010). For persons in jails and prisons, separation may translate into the higher rates we see there of such chronic disorders as cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, diabetes, HIV, hepatitis C as well as premature death (Clear, 2007; Freudenberg, Daniels, Crum, Perkins, & Richie, 2005; Maruschak, Berzofsky, & Unangst, 2015; Massoglia, Pare, Schnittker, & Gagnon, 2014).

Although there have been a handful of studies that address civic engagement in citizens who have histories of incarceration (Asad & Clair, 2018; Blakely et al., 2001; Gollust & Rahn, 2015; Purtle, 2013), few have sought to understand what elements in justice-involved persons’ lives might be associated positively with civic connectedness. Our research interest in the relationship between voter registration and incarceration emerged from small group sessions that we conducted over three years as part of a longitudinal cervical cancer prevention study in three county jails in the Midwest (Ramaswamy et al., 2017). As part of that study, we led weekly cohorts of jail-detained (not all had been charged or sentenced) women in discussions about barriers to cancer prevention and ways to overcome those barriers. Our program sought to foster self-efficacy on two levels. On the individual level, we invited women to share stories of and strategies for managing their health by staying up to date on screenings and avoiding known cervical cancer risks such as drug use and violence. On the collective level, we encouraged women to share their experiences in cultivating self-efficacy through acts of community, neighborhood, church, and civic involvement. Both levels were important, because what we know about incarcerated women from the pathways research indicates that, for many, repeated experiences of violence and trauma beginning in childhood have an effect on their sense of agency and ability to form and maintain relationships (Fries, Fedock, & Kubiak, 2014; Grella et al., 2013). Among the subtopics with which we concluded our self-efficacy strengthening discussions each week was how self-efficacy and self-empowerment could be fostered through voting (Emerson et al., 2018). We were struck by how often women in these conversations expressed inaccurate understandings of the impact that criminal justice involvement had on their voting eligibility, with many claiming no longer to have the right to vote.

The women’s perceptions of ineligibility are understandable. In the United States, the states individually determine voter eligibility requirements in their jurisdictions. As Ruth, Matusitz, and Simi (2017) have pointed out, so convoluted and varied across the states are regulations governing voting eligibility for persons with a history of incarceration that even the officials who execute the laws often find them confusing. In 2014–2016, when the data for this study were collected, all the states and territories were at least still held by the courts to the broad parameters of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the U.S. Constitution. In most states, including the two in which our study was conducted, as long as there was not also an active felony conviction, a person’s voting eligibility remained unaffected by arrest or conviction for misdemeanors or status violations (Chung, 2017). Jails are typically designated for pretrial and pre-sentencing, probation violation remands, and sentences of up to one year, usually following from misdemeanor charges (U.S. Department of Justice, 2018). In contrast, prisons house persons who have been convicted of felonies, which typically carry sentences of one year or more (U.S. Department of Justice, 2018). In the parent study, we purposefully did not ask the jail-detained women details about their criminal history (beyond lifetime time served) or why they were in jail, but they often spoke of them anyway, and like most jail detainees, most were under supervision for low-level drug crimes. Their remand to jail suggests that most were not currently under a felony conviction. Whatever their status, many of the women expressed both enthusiasm about the idea of building self-efficacy through acts of civic engagement and simultaneous doubt about their ability to do so, particularly with respect to voting. Our voter registration question—already included on the surveys—allowed us to follow up in a limited way, seeking answers in the data about what constellation of factors in the women’s lives might be most associated with being registered to vote.

Influencing our inquiry were resource theory, citizenship theory, and the health capabilities approach. Resource theory, a prominent assets-based model for explaining voter turnout behavior, holds that voting rates will tend to be higher among those with more resources (Brady, Verba, & Schlozman, 1995; Smets & van Ham, 2013). Persons with more time, money, and skills are able among other things able to establish broader social networks and tend to develop a keener sense of investment in public affairs. This leads to political behaviors like voting (Smets & van Ham, 2013). In a meta-analysis of studies on voter turnout, the most frequently applied resource variables were income and social status and then educational attainment and age, both of the latter also used independently to predict other (nonvoting) political involvement (Smets & van Ham, 2013). In the present study, we expected to find in line with resource theory that for women held in a county jail, voter registration, our single measure of civic engagement, would be predicted by economic and social variables, including income, access to health care, total lifetime incarceration, age, and education.

Also informing our research was Ponce and Rowe’s (2018) citizenship framework, a normative political model developed to account for how and why persons living with mental illness ought to be actively integrated into the full civic participation from which they are often excluded due to stigma and lack of access. Ponce and Rowe argued that because communities are founded on mutual investments between the collective and individuals, the community has an obligation to provide “social-structural, economic and environmental” supports to those who may be blocked from participation due to stigmatizing conditions (p. 23). Through instrumental and material support, social institutions can bolster the capacity of persons to exercise what Ponce and Rowe call the 5Rs—that is, rights, responsibilities, roles, resources, and relationships—of civic belonging. Although history of incarceration is not the same as living with a mental illness, Ponce and Rowe point out that persons with a history of incarceration are apt to face similar barriers of access based on stigma that limit their full expression of the 5Rs. Ponce and Rowe’s citizenship framework, with its basis in reciprocal obligations between communities and individuals, informed both our interpretation of findings and especially the implied reciprocity between civic engagement and community investment that we drew from them.

A related body of thought that influenced our understanding of the citizen framework and its potential application in this study was the health capabilities approach, which has also been used to argue that a political entity might have a key role in promoting individual citizens’ opportunities (i.e., supporting their capabilities) to reach, in this case health potentials (Ruger, 2006). Health equity in the context of capabilities refers to something other than a mathematically equal distribution of health or health resources because some will be better equipped, through physical ablement, mental endowment, and social positioning, to reach and make use of those resources (Ruger, 2006). Instead, health equity, similar to the citizenship framework, means differentially assisting persons to access and use basic goods like health care for the purpose of promoting what philosopher Martha Nussbaum (2002) refers to as human flourishing. Inequity, by contrast, means the exclusion from those resources, by effect as well as intent, that a culture deems fundamental to survival—food, shelter, health care (Nussbaum, 2002; Ruger, 2006). Persistent, systematic barriers put in the way of access to such resources, especially if experienced over long periods of time (i.e., generationally) or compounded by stigma such as that experienced as a result of incarceration, could presumably prompt withdrawal from political and civic life. We were interested to know what aspects of women’s lives pointed to such alienations—or their transcendence in continued engagement.

METHODS

Sample and Setting

The sample for this secondary analysis study (n=261) was adult women (aged 18 and older) who were recruited to participate in an interventional cervical cancer health literacy and prevention study over an 18-month period in two urban jails (2014–2016) and one suburban jail (Ramaswamy et al., 2017). In addition to incarceration and adult status, eligibility to participate included the ability to read English and no evidence of disruptive mental disorder. We recruited participants by posted notices in common areas of the jails and by jail staff, through word of mouth. All participants gave voluntary, informed, written consent to participate in the parent study. The design and procedures were approved by the institutional review board of the sponsoring academic institution and by administrators at the jails.

The jails in which we implemented the study are located in a single metropolitan statistical area in the Midwest United States that is peopled by more than 2 million inhabitants and comprises communities in two states. The jails ranged from 300 to 1,000 beds and encompassed minimum, medium, and maximum security levels. The race/ethnicity distributions in the parent study—49% White, non-Hispanic; 32% Black, non-Hispanic; and 21% Hispanic and other (Ramaswamy et al., 2017)—were comparable with national estimates of 48% White, non-Hispanic; 34% Black non-Hispanic; and 15% Hispanic (Zeng, 2018). In addition to incarceration and adult status, eligibility to participate in the parent study included the ability to read English and no evidence of disruptive mental disorder. We estimated, based on daily census records, that we enrolled 50% of the women who were admitted to the jails during the 18-month implementation period (Ramaswamy et al., 2017). Reasons for not participating are unknown.

In the design for the interventional parent study, volunteers were randomly assigned to experimental and wait-list control groups. Before assignment to groups and administration of the intervention, both groups completed the paper-and-pencil baseline surveys that provided data for the present analysis.

Measures

The 158-item baseline survey measured women’s knowledge, beliefs, and self-efficacy for preventive behaviors related to cervical health and cervical cancer risk. The parent study design and procedures have been described in more detail in a previous publication (Ramaswamy et al., 2017). Survey questions were designed to gather data on a cross-section of factors associated in the literature with women’s risk of cervical cancer and other sexually transmitted disease: (a) individual-level determinants of health, such as drug and alcohol use, homelessness, and economic need; and (b) community-level determinants of health, such as neighborhood security, racism, health care availability and access, insurance coverage, and medical home. Included with community-level determinants as an indicator of engagement, we included a single VOTE item (“Are you registered to vote?”), which serves as the dependent variable in the present analysis.

Statistical Analysis

Using chi-square contingency tables, we evaluated differences between the group that reported being registered to vote and the group that reported being not registered to vote on demographic characteristics such as age, race, income, employment, and housing status, as well as other individual- and community-level health factors. All variables that yielded significant differences between registered and non-registered participants were added to a forward multiple logistic regression model with a specified slentry value of 0.05. Remaining variables from the forward regression were used to form two SAS macros, one for regression and one for model evaluation, including multicollinearity. Analysis was performed using SAS Studio software, version 3.4.

RESULTS

In our sample of jailed women, 145/261 (56%) reported being registered to vote. Demographically, the women in the sample were on average 34years old; almost half identified as White, with one third reporting Black race. Two thirds of women had completed high school or more. Participant characteristics and variable descriptives are shown in Table 1.

Table 1.

Participant Characteristics

	n (%)
Age, mean (standard deviation)	33.7 (9.9)
White race	128 (49.0)
Black race	83 (31.8)
Hispanic	21 (8.0)
High school education or greater	163 (62.4)
Lifetime months incarcerated, median (IQR)	7.0 (21.0)
Homeless	66 (25.2)
Employed	85 (32.5)
Reliable transportation prior to incarceration	173 (66.2)
Registered to vote	145 (55.6)
Personal doctor	103 (39.4)
Medical home	183 (70.1)
Insured	106 (40.6)
Ever diagnosed with a mental health problem	191 (73.1)
Ever diagnosed with an alcohol problema	132 (50.5)
Hard drug use in 30days prior to incarceration	163 (62.4)
Ever exchanged sex for money, drugs or life necessities	91 (34.8)
Partner abuseb	160 (61.3)

Notes. N=261.

^aAssessed using AUDIT-C, which is scored on a scale of 0–12 (scores of 0 reflect no alcohol use). In women, a score of 3 or more is considered positive for alcohol problems.

^bPartner abuse, adapted from Verbal HITS Scale (Sherin et al. 1998), “In the one year prior to incarceration, did a partner physically hurt, insult or scream at you on a regular basis or fairly often?”

Chi-square contingency tables incorporating data from the 252 participants who answered “yes” or “no” to the voter registration question showed that race, lifetime months incarcerated, housing status, having a personal doctor, having a medical home, having insurance, and hard drug use in the 30 days prior to incarceration differed significantly for the two groups (Table 2). Table 3 presents results after applying these variables to a forward multiple regression model. Regression and model evaluation generated a significant model (X²=26.00, df=3, N=225, p =< .0001) that retained three of the original variables: identifying as Black, not having a stable place to live, and having personal insurance.

Table 2.

Odds Ratios for Associations Between Independent Variables and Voter Registration

Independent variables	Registered to vote OR (95% CI)
Agea	1.54 (0.93, 2.54)
White race	0.40 (0.24, 0.67)**
Black race	2.89 (1.61, 5.16)**
Hispanic	0.79 (0.32, 1.96)
High school education or greater	1.66 (0.97, 2.84)
Lifetime months incarceratedb	0.44 (0.26, 0.73)*
Homeless	0.40 (0.22, 0.73)*
Employed	1.39 (0.80, 2.41)
Reliable transportation prior to incarceration	1.33 (0.78, 2.28)
Personal doctor	2.45 (1.43, 4.19)**
Medical home	2.78 (1.54, 5.00)**
Insured	2.98 (1.72, 5.18)**
Ever diagnosed with a mental health problem	0.79 (0.44, 1.39)
Ever diagnosed with an alcohol problem	0.92 (0.56, 1.52)
Hard drug use in 30days prior to incarceration	0.48 (0.28, 0.82)**
Ever exchanged sex for money, drugs or life necessities	0.64 (0.37, 1.09)
Partner abuse	0.90 (0.53, 1.53)

Notes. N=252. OR=odds ratio. 95% CI = 95% confidence interval.

^aDichotomized by median value of 32years old.

^bDichotomized by median value of seven months incarcerated.

^*p≤.01

^**p≤.001.

Table 3.

Logistic Regression Analysis for Voter Registration

Independent variable	B	SE	Z-ratio	p-value	OR
Black	0.93	0.34	7.32	0.006	2.55
Homeless Insured	−0.82 0.82	0.33 0.30	6.10 7.23	0.01 0.007	0.43 2.27
Lifetime months
Incarcerated	−1.01	0.30	11.15	0.0008	0.36
Model X2 =	3.62
P-value =	0.45
N =	219a

Note. The dependent variable in this analysis was voter registration coded so that 0 = “not registered to vote” at the time of survey and 1 = “registered to vote” at time of survey.

^aTotal N=219 due to missing values for the response or explanatory variables.

Identifying as Black was associated with approximately twice the odds of being registered to vote as not being registered (OR = 2.32; 95% CI: [1.22, 4.39]; p < .01). Being unhoused was associated with half the odds of being registered to vote as not being registered (OR = .51; 95% CI: [.27, .96]; p = .03). Finally, for women in jail, having insurance, the sole health-care-access variable remaining in the model, was associated with more than twice greater odds of being registered to vote than not being registered (OR = 2.38; 95% CI: [1.34, 4.23]; p < .01). Variables were not found to be intercorrelated (VIF for Black race = 1.04, VIF for non-stable living status = 1.02, and VIF for insurance status = 1.06).

DISCUSSION

We found evidence that women with criminal justice involvement were more likely to be registered to vote if they had spent fewer months in jail over their lifetime, had not been homeless prior to incarceration, had personal health insurance, and identified as Black. The findings only indirectly and partially supported our expectations that age and asset-related factors such as economic standing and education would predict civic engagement. Disparate on its face, the model we estimated partially supports political theory that attributes voting to greater socioeconomic resources. Of particular note was the influence of personal health insurance, which is not among the factors typically considered in voter turnout research, although it no doubt falls within the compass of resource theory, as do the other two.

Length of Incarceration History

It is unsurprising that length of incarceration over a woman’s lifetime was associated with not being registered to vote. Criminal justice involvement, by definition, interrupts most opportunities for social and civic engagement. Nevertheless, more than half of our sample of incarcerated women were registered to vote. It is this finding, as well as conversations with the women about civic engagement (Ramaswamy et al., 2017), that sparked our interest in the topic and that suggests that even the most socially marginalized women find ways to participate in civic life. The burden of incarceration is also related to a woman’s ability to secure economic resources, particularly in the formal sector. To that extent, this finding, although rather obvious, supports the expectation from prior research that economic standing hampered by incarceration may be related to voting registration (Brady et al., 1995; Smets & van Ham, 2013).

Not Being Homeless

Not having been homeless contributed significantly to voter registration among incarcerated women in our analysis. Homelessness or being unhoused is related to socioeconomic standing and social integration and has been defined in the literature as sleeping outside (i.e., unsheltered), in emergency shelters, or in transitional housing (National Alliance to End Homelessness, 2016; Western, Braga, Davis, & Sirois, 2015). In our sample, nearly a quarter of women experienced homelessness in the year prior to their incarceration (Ramaswamy et al., 2017). Other research confirms that homelessness affects the justice-involved disproportionately, one national survey showing insecure housing to be 7.5 to 11.3 times more common among those with history of jail incarceration than among the general population (Opsal & Foley, 2013). The exacerbation of physical and mental health problems and the stigma that can accompany both homelessness and incarceration produce a medium for social exclusion, wherein poverty exists in a cyclical relationship with other social determinants to complicate a person’s integration and engagement in the community (Greenberg & Rosenheck, 2008; Kushel, Hahn, Evans, Bangsberg, & Moss, 2005; Opsal & Foley, 2013). Many justice-involved persons, for whom poverty and specifically housing are problems following an incarceration, suffer not only increased exposure to health risk but might also have or perceive that they have less access than others to the specific roles and relationships (e.g., neighbor, regular patron, employee/er, citizen) that define community and civic belonging (Uggen et al., 2013).

Current processes and rules of civic participation do little to mitigate the perception of social exclusion that a person with a history of incarceration might experience due to the overlapping effects of a criminal record, poverty, and homelessness (Western et al., 2015). For instance, having to meet increasingly strict voter eligibility requirements could well be perceived as alienating. All states now technically permit the homeless to vote, and nearly all states allow persons with other than an active felony sentence to vote, but many states still require applicants to give what amounts to proof of residence in order to register (National Conference of State Legislatures, 2017). Such requirements can pose difficulties for persons whose lack of income leads to frequent housing changes or who reside in places that are not typically defined as a domicile (National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, 2004). Further, to document identity and/or residence, states often require presentation of a driver’s license, passport, or some other form of legal identification (National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, 2004). All of the above require money, information, and the wherewithal to access and complete forms and navigate bureaucracies. For the insecurely housed, many of whom also live with mental illness and substance abuse issues, such barriers may well prove prohibitive.

Having Personal Insurance

In bivariate analysis, we found several health care access variables to be more frequent among incarcerated women who were registered to vote than those who were not registered, including having a personal doctor, a medical home, and health insurance. Only having personal health insurance remained significant in regression. In our sample overall, 54% of the women were uninsured, with another 28% reporting Medicaid coverage (Ramaswamy et al., 2017). The uninsured rate for our participants was over three times higher than the uninsured rate (15.7%, averaged) in the three cities in which our study was conducted (US Census Bureau, 2019). Other research with incarcerated women reports uninsured rates between 26% and 90%, suggesting that, conservatively speaking, a quarter of women leave incarceration with no health coverage other than emergency department care (Lee, Vlahov, & Freudenberg, 2006; Mallik-Kane & Visher, 2008; Massoglia et al., 2014). Although many jail-incarcerated women occupy low socioeconomic status and have diagnosed mental and other health conditions that qualify them for Medicaid insurance prior to incarceration, states individually determine eligibility and regulate the administration of Medicaid benefits. In many places, coverage is terminated upon incarceration and is not automatically reinstated on release (Mallik-Kane & Visher, 2008; Travis, Western, & Redburn, 2014). Women must reapply for coverage during their transition back into the community during a period when health and mortality risk are elevated (Massoglia et al., 2014).

In the relationship between health insurance and voter registration, we surmised that, like the other two significant health care variables in bivariate analysis (i.e., personal doctor and medical home), having health insurance may reflect an underlying construct that has to do not solely with access to care but, similar to having a home, with social integration more broadly—an individual’s perceived enmeshment in a collective that promotes her well-being by facilitating access to basic resources. The reciprocity that undergirds such thinking relates to Ponce and Rowe’s (2018) citizenship framework, in which civic belonging for persons who are marginalized by their mental health or criminal justice status is promoted by institutions that work actively to reduce barriers. From a capabilities standpoint, such would mean removing barriers to basic health care and other goods that enable persons to exercise their human capacities for “flourishing” (Nussbaum, 2002, p. 132; Ruger, 2006). When access to basic goods like food, shelter, and health care is blocked—especially over the long term—the community signals a lack of investment, and a citizen’s reciprocal turning away from civic involvement should perhaps come as no surprise.

Identifying as Black

Finally, our model indicated that, among women in jail, those who identified as Black were over twice as likely to be registered to vote as women who identified as White. The finding corresponds with patterns in rates of registration and voting reported by the U.S. Census Bureau. In the 2016 national election, for example, in the age groups 18 to 24years, 25 to 44years, and 45 to 64years, Black women were registered to vote at proportionally higher rates than White women, Black men, or White men (U.S. Census Bureau, 2017). Eligible Black women’s registration rate, averaged across age groups, outpaced Black men’s by more than five percentage points in 2016 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2017).

Black women’s higher registration rates than other race–gender groups challenge traditional models including the resource model in which higher education attainment, income level, and other aspects of socioeconomic status have been held to predict political and electoral participation (Smets & van Ham, 2013; Verba, Lerman Schlozman, & Brady, 1995). To better understand Black women’s voting rates, Farris and Holman (2014) have applied an intersectional model, measuring diverse factors for association with electoral and political participation, first, intracategorically, for Black women alone, and then intercategorically, in comparison with White women, Black men, and White men. Their findings indicated that Black women’s political participation depends less on mainstream markers of social integration such as income level and education attainment and more on alternative, informal sources of social capital (Farris & Holman, 2014). Black women, that is, might be motivated to engage civically as a result of belonging to community networks of family and friends that foster a sense of belonging outside the formal institutions of schools, work, and importantly, even the church (Farris & Holman, 2014).

That Black women cultivate social networks for mutual support in the United States, especially in conditions that might be defined as low in material resources, is not a novel finding. It was the thesis advanced by Carol Stack (1974) in her classic ethnographic study of supportive kin networks among a disadvantaged Black population in Chicago in the late 1960s. Historians have also documented the rich legacy of the Black women’s social club movement in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These voluntary associations formed in the face of pervasive social, economic, and cultural exclusions to promote a range of goods in the Black community that were not supported by official institutions, including race “uplift,” women’s suffrage, and public health (Ferguson, 1988, p. 244; Firor Scott, 1990; Lerner, 1974). What is compelling about the association between race and voter registration in the current study is the suggestion that, in the midst of the very barriers of poverty, low education, substance abuse, and trauma that have been associated with women’s incarceration in the 21st century, and with little formal, material sign of community investment, there persists nonetheless for Black women with a history of incarceration a comparatively strong orientation toward civic engagement. It seems likely that for many Black women, civic engagement is motivated by cultural and historical practices that have long operated outside and in spite of the resources formalized in power structures of the state and economy and even outside the mediating social and voluntary structures to which Ponce and Rowe (2018) assigned a prominent supportive role.

Implications

Although our results did not directly answer our expectation that resources traditionally linked with political participation—namely, age, income, education—would be associated with voter registration among women detained in jail, what we found indirectly supported resource theory and bolstered our hunch that access to health care may be prominent in the constellation of factors that contribute to feelings of social and civic engagement in the context of recent incarceration. Not having been homeless, having personal health insurance, and identifying as Black could all be linked indirectly to access to resources or forms of social support. Personal health insurance and housing might function as part of a transactional phenomenon, in which a justice-marginalized citizen’s involvement in the civic affairs of the community is invoked, fostered, or otherwise advanced by a community’s formal, material investment in their basic health and well-being. Less clear in our results was the role of race. Black women who have historically occupied a socially disenfranchized position vis-á-vis official, normative (i.e., White, middle class, male-dominant) social and political hierarchies, seemed to represent an exception. If being a Black woman is like having health insurance and housing in its propensity to predict voter registration, it is different in that its source—judging by the profound difficulty with which the women in our study met in attempting to access public assistance—is not found in official institutions and structures but instead in sources of inclusion and value that are both unofficial and highly resilient.

The potentially reciprocal effect of community health investment on civic engagement among women who have criminal justice involvement implies the need for more accessible housing assistance for persons leaving detention or incarceration and greater support for social programs such as Medicaid and universal health care. Reform to improve the availability and coordination of transitional health services alone could signal that the community values the basic health and welfare of those who are otherwise socially excluded through criminal justice involvement. Investments by the public in justice-marginalized groups could play an important role in reversing a trend that increasingly casts whole sectors of U.S. citizens as objects of surveillance, punishment, and profit rather than participant-agents in a representative democracy.

LIMITATIONS

The study had a number of limitations. One limitation of the study was the convenience sample. As is common in jail and prison research, women were initially approached by staff at the jails and then consented and randomly assigned to groups. We have a good, ongoing relationship with the administrators in all three of the jails in which the data were collected and are confident that women were not pressured to participate. However, it is possible that the women who volunteered were motivated to do so in part because they feel more socially engaged. In other words, self-selection bias might have affected the validity of our findings. This study was also quite obviously limited by use of a single-item measure of civic engagement and, to a lesser extent, the study’s being set in a single geographic region. As our research question emerged during the course of an existing study, we were confined in this analysis to evaluating women’s civic engagement by the single measure applied in the original study, voter registration. Undoubtedly, using additional measures for civic engagement—in particular, voting, volunteering, local and national campaign involvement, neighborhood or church sponsored public activity, and other participation in democratic process and public welfare—would yield a fuller picture. We recommend further study with justice-marginalized (i.e., incarcerated, probation, parole) populations in varied geographic settings, using an elaborated civic engagement measure. Tool development with factor analysis to create more sensitive and specific measures of the dimensions of community health investment and their application to samples by group, especially by income, would be enlightening.

CONCLUSION

In this study, we asked what factors were most associated with voter registration among jailed women and found that, roughly in keeping with political resource theory, having health insurance and stable housing were most predictive of voter registration. In addition, identifying as Black remained a significant predictor of voter registration. Further investigation is needed to confirm and more confidently interpret these findings, including testing the direction of the relationships and parsing out the mechanisms that link civic engagement to access to resources like health care and housing. We argue that our findings support citizenship models that hold societies to be obligated to provide means to persons who for reasons of stigma and differential access are not able to engage fully as citizens in their communities. We also speculate there may be a reciprocal phenomenon at work in which persons in marginalized groups who perceive that the community is invested in them may be more likely to engage in the civic processes of the community. Perhaps it is only through such mutual investments that a people knits itself together into a holistically healthy social body and a more fully participatory democracy.