Six Questions: Robin Templeton Talks With the Alliance

Robin Templeton is Executive Director of Right to Vote: The National Campaign to End Felony Disfranchisement, a collaboration among eight national civil rights and public interest organizations. The Campaign's mission is to secure the right to vote for the 4.65 million people in the United States denied access to the ballot because of felony conviction. The Campaign is piloting re-enfranchisement efforts in Alabama, Florida, Maryland, New York and Texas.

Previously, Robin was Communications Director at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. She was a member of the founding organizing committee of Critical Resistance and worked with the acclaimed writing program for youth in detention, Pacific News Service’s The Beat Within. She has a Masters in Education from Harvard University, where she researched the criminalization of youth, especially as it occurs through the school system, and wrote Pedagogy of the Policed. She has been widely published on juvenile and criminal justice issues, most recently in the young feminist’s anthology The Fire This Time. She has a three-month son, Truth Union Templeton-Blain.

1. How did you get involved in drug-policy reform?

I'm committed to replacing the prison industrial complex with a sane and humane approach to community safety that is not racist and retributive. The Drug War is an evil manifestation of the cruel American prison machine as it decimates communities of color, thus my involvement in drug-policy reform.
 
2. What is your current role in the field?

I direct Right to Vote, an effort to end felony disfranchisement laws that trace back to Jim Crow and bar 4.7 million people, including 1.4 million African American men, from voting. Over 1 million people convicted of drug-related felonies are included in this total number of our mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers who are locked out of political participation in the United States.
 
3. What is your most memorable drug war moment?

It's a series of moments:  Working in juvenile jails in California and – day in and out – seeing how many Black and Brown young women and men were forced by failing schools and poverty into the street economy, and then lockdown.
 
4. What challenge would you most like to see the drug-policy reform movement overcome this year?

Abolish New York's Rockefeller Drug Laws (!) and thereby reach the tipping point toward implementing sane and humane drug policies nationwide.
 
5. One sentence, please, that sums up your views on drug-policy reform.

We need treatment, not incarceration.
 
6. What is your advice to fellow reformers who want to be more active in the field?

Heed the words of James Baldwin:  "Everything now before us is in our hands, we have no right to assume otherwise."