Jeb Bush Made Voting Rights Contingent on Sobriety, but Cut Funding for Treatment
http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2015/10/jeb-bush-prison-vetoes-florida
Flrida is one of just three states that permanently disenfranchises everyone with a felon conviction. Today, that system excludes nearly 1.5 million Floridians from voting and disproportionately affects African Americans, with about 20 percent of the state's black voting-age population barred from the ballot box. For many people, such as White, the only way to earn back the right to vote, to serve on a jury, and to run for office is to make the trip to Tallahassee and personally petition the governor and cabinet for clemency. Mother Jones recently analyzed more than 1,000 pages of transcripts to assess how Bush, now a Republican presidential candidate, oversaw the process during his eight years as governor.
Before restoring an ex-felon's civil rights, Bush wanted proof that the former offender had put his past behind him and become a productive member of society. He asked the men and women who appeared before him if they had a job. If ex-offenders had committed crimes involving drugs or alcohol—a significant portion of them had—he wanted them to be sober. Completing a treatment program helped offer the proof Bush wanted that the people before him, like White, had truly turned a corner.
But Bush's desire to see successful reintegration into society often ran up against his governing philosophy, which prioritized tax cuts and often rebuffed state legislators who sought additional funding for projects in their districts. Bush sought to rein in the budget by using his line-item veto power aggressively, cutting nearly $2 billion out of the state's budgets from 1999 to 2007. Bush embraced the nickname "Veto Corleone" and has used it on the campaign trail as evidence of his conservative economic record. But many of the projects that succumbed to his veto pen were the very programs that helped ex-felons meet Bush's own criteria for evaluating who deserved the right to vote.
Mother Jones searched a comprehensive list of all of Bush's vetoes and found 32 vetoed items, totaling nearly $13 million, that would have funded programs for substance abuse and helped prisoners reintegrate into society. (The list below does not include many of the substance abuse programs targeted at adolescents. In his second year in office, Bush signed a law imposing draconian mandatory minimum sentences—up to 20 years in adult prison—for minors convicted of certain crimes, while also dedicating $5 million to drug and alcohol rehabilitation for minors.)