Joyce Hamilton Henry also contributed to this blog.

The struggle to protect the fundamental right to vote for people with a felony conviction is nothing new in this country, but has now reached a crisis level. Almost six million people are denied the right to vote because of felon disfranchisement laws that perpetuate racial and economic disparities by excluding citizens from the democratic process even after they have paid their debt to society. Last week none other than Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) came out in favor of restoring the right to vote for the formerly incarcerated.

The result is of the injustice of felony disenfranchisement is that people, especially people of color, are legally barred from participating in our system of government, and denied a say in the issues that impact their communities. Factors that contribute to so many people's involvement in the criminal justice system in the first place are then rarely addressed.

Florida, unsurprisingly, has one of the worst records when it comes to felon re-enfranchisement. While other states revoke the right to vote of a person convicted of a felony most states restore voting rights once a person has completed his or her sentence, and provide a streamlined process for restoration of rights. Florida, in contrast, has erected a convoluted, antiquated and ineffective system which makes it virtually impossible for anyone to get his or her rights restored. The result is that tens of thousands of applications for rights restoration have remained in limbo for years. Election after election passes, with fewer and fewer Florida citizens able to participate.

Earlier this month, the ACLU and other civil rights organizations detailed the crisis of felon disfranchisement and the barriers to rights restoration in aShadow Report submitted to the UN Committee on Human Rights, explaining U.S. non-compliance with its obligations as a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The report highlights how, as of 2010, Florida has disfranchised more than 1.5 million citizens due to a felony conviction – amounting to 10.42 percent of the state's voting age population and 23.3 percent of Florida's African-American voting age population.

The arbitrary nature of Florida's rights restoration process is best illustrated by how the change in the state's administration – from Gov. Charlie Crist to Gov. Rick Scott – resulted in a shift from 115,000 grants of rights restoration in 2007 to a shutdown in the process in 2011, with the current governor denying or rendering ineligible the overwhelming majority of applications. The backlog of applications – some 100,000 in all – pending when Governor Scott took office does, however, belie the notion that people in the U.S., especially those with criminal convictions, do not want to participate in elections

For decades, the ACLU also has been at the forefront of this issue, advocating for legislative and public policy changes and bringing cases to dismantle this unfair system. The clients we have represented are men and women who want to be productive citizens, contribute to improving how our society functions and have a say in the issues that impact them and their communities.

The U.S. prides itself on having a participatory form of government, but the truth is that we still have a long way to go. Because of the difficulties people in Florida and around the country have had when it comes to restoring their voting rights, to combat this issue and bring about real positive change, we need to increase international pressure by assuring compliance with the ICCPR.

This blog post originally appeared on ACLU’s National Blog of Rights on Monday, September 23rd, 2013.

By Eduardo Gonzalez, former director of the U.S. Marshals Service.

I have worked as a law enforcement professional for 34 years, rising through the ranks from patrolman to deputy director in the Miami-Dade Police Department during a 27-year career. Later, it was my privilege to return to my hometown of Tampa when I was selected to serve as its police chief. Finally, I was given the opportunity to serve at the national level as director of the U.S. Marshals Service for the past five-and-a-half years of my career.

There isn’t anyone I’ve worked with in law enforcement who would disagree that the single most important asset local police have in protecting public safety is the trust and cooperation of the community they are sworn to protect.

Prior to my arrival in Tampa, the police department spent considerable energy developing that public trust. During my time as chief, we continued working hard to further build the trust of our community. Based on our efforts, community members would contact us with information about crimes they had witnessed. They were our eyes and ears, and greatly enhanced our ability to detect and stop crimes.

Because of my continuing commitment to the concept of community-based policing, I am deeply concerned that the House of Representatives is considering the so-called SAFE Act, a draconian immigration enforcement bill that authorizes states and localities to write and enforce their own immigration laws.

In jurisdictions that have adopted policies such as the SAFE Act, the result has been law enforcement officers questioning the immigration status of everyone they encounter, including crime victims and witnesses. In my opinion, this practice would seriously damage the law enforcement-community relationship which has been built up over many years in communities with large immigrant populations.

That’s why I believe the SAFE Act would be a disaster, a fact also recognized by the Major City Chiefs Association, which represents the 56 largest U.S. cities, including Tampa, Miami and Jacksonville. Rather than enhance public safety, the SAFE Act will undermine it by destroying community-based policing efforts. Equally important in these austere times, the assumption of federal law enforcement duties by local law enforcement will place additional strains on community budgets and local taxpayers, diverting precious police resources away from fighting local crime. I believe it will also contribute to racial and ethnic profiling that alienates minorities and exposes police departments to legal liability.

If law enforcement officers are tasked with enforcing immigration law — as local jurisdictions would be mandated to do under the SAFE Act — many people in the immigrant community will simply avoid contact with the police at all costs. This includes those who are undocumented and those with legal status because so many immigrant families are mixed-status households. Latino victims of crimes are 44 percent less likely to call the police because they fear the police will ask about their immigration status or the status of someone that they know (this proportion increases to 70 percent for undocumented immigrants).

As a result of the SAFE Act, huge swaths of the community would therefore refuse to report crimes, identify suspects or serve as witnesses for fear that they, their family members, or their neighbors will be deported. This mistrust makes police officers’ jobs much harder and makes all of us less safe.

This legislation would also undermine public safety by diverting critical and already strained police resources away from the task of pursuing serious and violent crimes and into the complicated and vague task of enforcing immigration laws against individuals who do not threaten public safety.

Immigration law is highly complex, and I believe it would be exceedingly costly and practically impossible to construct a training program for police to know when they should stop someone without resorting to racial and ethnic appearance. Having local police officers enforce immigration law is a recipe for lawsuits.

I don’t think police officers, whose primary mission is to ensure the safety of the communities they serve, have any business getting involved in immigration enforcement. Requiring them to do so, as the SAFE Act envisions, would be wholly counterproductive to their primary mission of keeping communities safe and diametrically opposed to everything I learned in my 34 years of law enforcement experience.

Note: this article first appeared in the August 31 edition of the Tampa Tribune.