It can be confidently argued that the Bush presidency was enabled precisely by the relegation of a large, majority black population of “free” individuals to the status of civil death. George W. Bush “won” the Florida elections in 2000 by a tiny margin of 537 votes. As Congressman John Conyers has pointed out, the fact that 600,000 ex-felons were denied participation in the elections in the state of Florida alone “may have literally changed the history of this nation.” We might thus argue that the deep structural life of racism in the U.S. prison system gave us the president who articulated the collective fears linked to a psychic historical reservoir of racism in order to wage wars on the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq under the guise of combating terror.

From Chapter 10 of The Meaning of Freedom and Other Difficult Dialogues by Angela Y. Davis.