“It should be a broader conversation,” said Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, a progressive civil rights advocacy group. Mr. Sanders struggled to win over black voters in 2016, and his campaign is working to do better this time around. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive Democrat from New York, sought to reframe the debate over the issue. “There’s a difference between felons who are in prison for nonviolent offenses and those who are in for capital offenses,” said Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a center-left think tank. Christopher Uggen, a professor of sociology and law at the University of Minnesota who was one of the authors of the report, estimated that about a quarter of those people were incarcerated.

Source: New York Times April 27, 2019 12:06 UTC