In Punishment and Inclusion, Andrew Dilts builds a theoretical argument to explore what it means to exclude people with criminal convictions from the polity, what this practice tells us about American liberalism as an organizing ideology, and what it communicates about the work accomplished by felon disenfranchisement laws. The latter inquiry is what makes Dilts’ work unique: By weaving together the concepts of punishment, techniques of power, racial animus, the production and maintenance of white supremacy, with the concept of citizenship, Dilts offers a historical and theoretical argument about how the boundaries of political membership are policed. In an attempt to challenge and rethink the connection between political and punitive practices, Dilts contends that American society must grapple with liberalism and neoliberalism in an effort to dismantle the connection between voting rights and criminal status. Dilts situates his argument within the tradition of critical theory by engaging the work of Foucault, Locke, Shklar, Marion Young, de Beauvoir, and others, and drawing upon a diverse set of philosophical perspectives including disability theory, political philosophy, critical race theory, and post-colonial and legal studies. At the heart of his analysis is an exploration of how these philosophers and theories interpret punishment, and how punishment relates to proportionality (i.e. “just deserts”), citizenship, infamy, race, slavery, and moral political membership.

Dilts evaluates the normative values of felon disenfranchisement, and its history in the United States, to make sense of why many current appeals to dismantle the exclusionary practice have failed. Through his investigation about the roots of felon disenfranchisement, its connection to the discourse of power and knowledge, and who is entitled to and who is excluded from political membership, Dilts argues that felon disenfranchisement has created a racial caste system through criminalization. His analysis reveals how a triangular relationship between felon, citizen, and the state is structured and reinforced, and how these relationships produce power. Dilts’ philosophical argument throughout the text challenges normative evaluations of felon disenfranchisement, and reasons that any critique must begin by recognizing its roots in racial hostility. Dilts’ goal is to question our “blind spots” about the dual work of punishment and political membership (p. 109).

Dilts’ examination of the racial history of the United States in Punishment and Inclusion concludes that felon disenfranchisement arises from white citizens’ need to distinguish administrative laws and criminal laws from electoral laws. As a result, American liberalism is now a system of racial subordination and domination perpetuated through an electoral system that focuses more on exclusion than inclusion. By falsely separating laws that are actually connected, Dilts argues, felon disenfranchisement masks negative externalities while maintaining an image of the ideal white citizen as an innocent, wealthy man who is mentally independent. Racially-structured felon disenfranchisement must also be viewed through a nexus of mental health categories and criminality. The criminal law constructs outsiders, and once placed outside the demos their subjugation is continued through the practice of power around racial constructs. Dilts argues that presumed racial differences are used to stigmatize, and just as disabled individuals are ascribed cognitive insufficiency and other mental weaknesses, racial bias allows felons to be viewed as dangerous. The two ascriptions are linked by a belief that the cognitively disabled, and racial minorities, both lack a fundamental ability to follow the law, and therefore are inherently criminal. Restrictive election law is thus justified as a means to keep rebels, criminals, and lunatics away from the franchise, and although these three exclusions are “color-blind” and “gender-blind,” they potentially eliminate almost everyone but “free white men” from the electorate. Determining who is included and excluded from the electorate allows Dilts to connect political exclusion to the notion of disability, with implications for how a felony conviction becomes a form of excludable identity fusing stereotypes about race, ability, and criminality.

Dilts maintains that one way to dismantle criminal disenfranchisement would be to make punishment only about punishment, and citizenship only about citizenship (p. 202). Dilts calls for the abolishment of all forms of criminal disenfranchisement as a necessary first step, recognizing that disenfranchisement is the racially discriminatory outcome of a presumed—but false—relationship between punishment and political membership, and that the legitimacy of electoral rules is undermined when based on the exclusion of certain people. A second necessary step, Dilts offers, is that the political community should dismantle the normative white polity and confront the fact that the constrained electorate works for whites but is deeply pernicious towards minorities (p. 202). Left unchanged, felon disenfranchisement reinforces white political hegemony through demarcating who is presumed criminal and who is not, and is deeply problematic for democracy.

For all of its strengths, at times the text seems repetitive as the philosophical arguments follow a formulaic analysis. Except in the conversation around race and the criminal justice system, the text sometimes gets bogged down as Dilts repeats claims that the boundaries of citizenship are marked through punishment, and persons who are punished are deemed unworthy to be citizens. Dilts makes these claims with only a superficial interrogation of changes in the criminal justice system that occurred during the expansion of political rights and rights of citizenship in the 19th and 20th centuries. Instead, Dilts’ constructive criticism focuses on what liberal theorists often omit from their work when thinking about power and knowledge, such as identities grounded in race, gender, and sexuality. Dilts himself focuses on race and how it pertains to the problem of the “free negro” in relationship to voting (p. 153), and fails to engage gender and sexuality as other dimensions of exclusion in the polity. Despite these weaknesses, Dilts’ work contributes a great deal to our understanding of how disenfranchisement laws are a punitive approach that produces citizens who are legally disabled and excluded from the electorate, via the criminal justice system.