Who Gets To Vote In Florida?

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2020

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Angel Sanchez was 17 and in prison when he learned felons couldn't vote in Florida. When he got out, he tried to change that. It was working – until money got involved.| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:05.0	In 2000 at the age of 17, Angel Sanchez gets his first real job.
0:12.0	It's in the law library at the DeSoto Correctional Institution in Southwest Florida, where Angel is an inmate.
0:19.0	My first day at work, I walk in and they tell me this is your desk.
0:25.0	And that was like, what? I got a desk. I've never in my life had a desk before that moment.
0:32.0	Right away, Angel loves this place. There are no guards, there's no fighting. They even have their own coffee pot.
0:39.0	And it was a sense of liberating. I almost felt like I was out of prison in that moment.
0:43.0	Angel had lived a hard life. The first time police put him in handcuffs, he was in the third grade in the principal's office.
0:51.0	By age 14, Angel traded 60 bucks in his super Nintendo for his first gun. He ran away from home, he joined a gang.
1:00.0	And at 17, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison for armed robbery and gang related shootings.
1:07.0	And it's in his first year in prison that he gets that job in the library.
1:12.0	And as he begins to study the law there, he starts to feel something that he's never really felt before.
1:19.0	Like maybe he has options.
1:22.0	I liked it because it allowed me to challenge the system in a legal way. I always felt like there was never a challenge.
1:28.0	The police stopped me, I can't do nothing about that. They slapped me, I can't do nothing about that.
1:32.0	And the law gave me an avenue that says no, you could challenge it.
1:37.0	Angel starts working on a paralegal certificate. And as he's studying, he starts to think, wait, this is not as hard as I thought it would be.
1:46.0	And the law was like, wow, what are the lawyers charge so much? It doesn't take that much to learn to do this.
1:52.0	And most of the forms are prefilled. I'm like, what is going on here? I thought it was a scam.
1:57.0	And I'm like, this is this esoteric thing that I thought only genius is new. I could get it.
2:02.0	Either I'm a genius or they're not. And I said, man, have I ever got out? Could that be a lawyer?
2:07.0	But then he thinks, oh, wait, would they even let me be a lawyer with a felony conviction?
	...

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