Editor’s note: This story is presented as a tribute to the life of Cynetra Freeman and the work of the organization she founded, the Mississippi Center for Reentry, a Southern Poverty Law Center Vote Your Voice grant recipient. Freeman died late last year, after the SPLC interviewed her for this story. The SPLC extends its sympathies to her friends and family.
When Cynetra Freeman moved from Florida to northwest Mississippi in 2012, she was looking for a job that could help her get back on her feet. The next five years would prove a difficult test.
Physically, she was ill. Freeman had end-stage renal failure that required dialysis three days a week. Mentally, she was tired. The dialysis pushed her body to the brink, leading her to heart failure. It wasn’t until 2017 that her doctor deemed her stable enough to work. Emotionally, she felt raw.
When she entered a county workforce office that year, she was hoping to make a fresh start. The clerk who approached her seemed happy to help. She asked Freeman what kind of professional experience she had — a bachelor’s degree in criminology. The clerk wanted to learn more.
“I wasn’t going to hide my background,” Freeman said.
Years prior, while living in Florida, she had been convicted of a crime. She had worked hard to get her life back on track, paid her fines and fees and successfully petitioned Florida to reinstate her right to vote. She was free and clear to move on with her life. So, she told the county workforce clerk about her record.
The woman had been flipping through the pages of a binder that Freeman presumed were job listings. She slammed it shut.
The woman told her, “You will never get a job because you have a felony,” Freeman recalled. Here she was, sitting in an office that received federal funding, in part, to help jobseekers like her with legal records. “And this how I was treated. She made me feel so small. I lost hope.”
Freeman wondered how many others had gone through the same experience. At first wounded by rejection, she said the experience motivated her to “go harder.” That year, she founded the Mississippi Center for Reentry (MS Reentry), the only organization focused exclusively on serving justice-impacted individuals in northwest Mississippi.
Fighting for a second chance
Since 2022, Freeman had entered Mississippi Department of Corrections facilities to provide voter education and conduct registration drives for imprisoned people. To date, MS Reentry has educated more than 500 people inside jails and prisons and helped 183 former and currently incarcerated people complete voter registration applications.
Many are unaware, she said, that not all felonies disqualify a person from restoring their rights. But scare tactics and misinformation discourage many from seeking information. To date, MS Reentry has helped 35 people who were not eligible to register to vote complete what’s called the suffrage bills process. It’s an onerous appeal that requires a convicted person to be sponsored by a state legislator, and supported by the votes of their fellow legislators, to restore their right to vote. Twenty-three crimes are ineligible for voting rights restoration in Mississippi. Cases are ultimately decided by submission to the secretary of state for individual review.
This grassroots work earned MS Reentry a $50,000 grant over two years through the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Vote Your Voice initiative, conducted in partnership with the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta. The SPLC has pledged $100 million in grants over the next decade to support organizations in Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana.
Once people have returned to their communities, MS Reentry provides skill-building opportunities, facilitates job fairs and connects justice-impacted people — now through a new hotline — with services they need to successfully reintegrate and deter recidivism. Freeman ran the organization full time with about five volunteers.
There are numerous challenges for returning people attempting to reintegrate into their communities. There are the fines and fees related to incarceration that can amount to thousands of dollars, the scarcity of jobs in rural areas — where most parolees in northwest Mississippi return — and the stigma of a legal conviction.
Working to enfranchise system-impacted people can be difficult, particularly in a staunchly conservative state that’s faced criticism for restrictive laws meant to curb the voting rights of its Black population.
“The emphasis for us is on access to democracy and civic engagement,” said Robin Brulé, Vote Your Voice program officer at the SPLC. “Due to misinformation, many people who can vote think they have been barred from voting. Or they oftentimes encounter misinformed board of election workers who wrongly assume that they have not regained their voting rights. Our work is focused on people being able to vote and have representation without barriers. This is bipartisan work.”
Banned for life
In July, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld a law that would allow Mississippi to strip for life the right to vote of anyone with a felony conviction. This followed the state’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling in favor of six plaintiffs last year that the ban constituted cruel and unusual punishment. MS Reentry was one of the groups advocating for the law’s reversal.
More than 4 million Americans have lost their right to vote due to felony conviction. Most states, however, no longer ban people from voting for life and have established some process to restore rights lost due to felony conviction. In 23 states, people’s rights are automatically restored upon their release.
Black people make up 5% of disenfranchised voters in Mississippi. Since 2022, MS Reentry has held an annual legislative caucus meeting to set priorities and discuss second-chance policies that would help impacted people reintegrate into their communities. The initiative was made possible by their first grant from the SPLC.
Mississippi has among the highest rates of poverty in the U.S. at about 18%, according to Census Bureau data. The state also has one of the highest incarceration rates in the nation. Data from the Prison Policy Initiative estimates the rate of people incarcerated in Mississippi is only slightly less than that of the entire country of El Salvador. About 10% of Mississippians have lost their right to vote, or nearly 1 in every 10 adults.
The roots of the state’s punitive disenfranchisement law date back to a clause in its 1890 constitution meant to strike down the rising political power of formerly enslaved Black people during the Reconstruction era, a time when Black people briefly gained new rights that allowed them more access to the country’s democracy — a benefit that until that time had been solely reserved for white men.
That centuries-long effort has disturbing implications in the present day, as the state’s Black citizens and its poorest people bear the brunt of criminalization, disenfranchisement and voter suppression in Mississippi’s attempt to dilute their political power.
MS Reentry has attempted to push back by advocating for counter-policies such as a state expungement law that would remove qualifying crimes from a person’s legal record, and the expansion of Medicaid and voting rights. Last year, the group successfully lobbied a bill’s passage that suspends the payment of child support while a person is incarcerated.
The power to create lasting change
In 2023, Angela Dawson met Freeman when she participated in an SPLC-sponsored local advocacy workshop with the nonprofit founder. Dawson felt moved by Freeman’s experience and how her past conviction had charted her path to advocacy.
Dawson, who is a labor and community advocate, volunteered time with the group by facilitating career workshops and lobbying at the state Capitol in Jackson. She now serves as a MS Reentry board member.
“You just don’t throw people away because they’ve made a mistake,” said Dawson. “Their rights shouldn’t be stripped, especially if they’ve committed a nonviolent crime.”
The group is collecting data from the people they serve as well as nonprofit partners to learn more about the returning population as well as strengthen reentry services and the group’s policy agenda. Better access to jobs, health care and the restoration of voting rights are issues that remain paramount. Without voting power, Freeman asked, how can returning people contribute to creating lasting change within their communities?
DeSoto, Tunica, Marshall and Tate counties — where MS Reentry taught voters how to fill out sample ballots, provided information about political candidates and drove voters to the polls — experienced a 20% increase in voter turnout during 2022 local elections. Eleven percent were formerly incarcerated people. According to the group, there are about 8,000 unregistered voters living in these four counties, and formerly incarcerated community members make up about 12% of them.
The SPLC Vote Your Voice grant has helped MS Reentry expand its efforts and build capacity. So far, the justice-impacted people they’re working with have been able to stay out of the system and rejoin their communities, Freeman said.
“Not having the right to vote leaves you powerless in your political decision-making. It keeps you mentally shackled,” she said. “I can see the difference in the reentry community because they see that there’s hope. They see someone just like them that’s in their corner.”
Image at top: In a 2006 photo, supporters for a bill that would automatically restore voting rights to people convicted of felonies upon their release from prison gather in front of the State House in Montgomery, Alabama. More than 4 million Americans have lost their right to vote due to felony conviction. (Credit: Rob Carr/AP)