In a country with the highest incarceration rates in the world, the voting rights of Americans with felony convictions have gained much attention in recent years. Most of the conversation has focused on states that have reestablished rights for those with felony convictions — including, most recently, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Georgia — bringing the total number of states to 15 that have reenfranchised ex-felons.

But what of the other roughly 1.5 million who are still behind bars? The issue hasn’t been in the public discourse as much. The vast majority of states do not allow incarcerated people to vote, and those that do only allow it for people with certain convictions. Though legislators in several states have tried unsuccessfully to introduce measures to restore these rights, only two states as of now allow all inmates, regardless of their conviction, to vote: Maine and Vermont, which have had the rights of inmates to vote enshrined into law since their founding. 

In both states, corrections officials and volunteers can help inmates request an absentee ballot and cast their vote. Yet there are additional barriers to voting for people behind bars. Many are restricted from the internet or other ways to access news, and are not allowed to campaign or put up political posters. But most likely the biggest issue is illiteracy — an estimated 60 percent of inmates are unable to read or write. For all these reasons, experts estimate that inmate voting rates are likely low, though because they are not tracked in either Maine’s or Vermont’s prison system, the rates are still unknown. 

But this year, one prisoner — a Maine resident and current inmate — is voting for the first time in a presidential election. Here’s how he’s thinking about this election and his right to vote as an incarcerated person.

Normally, I drive a truck in Maine. Now I’m incarcerated and will be released next May. But that’s not going to stop me from checking a big first off my list: At well past the age of 40, I’m going to vote in the presidential election for the first time ever, and I’m doing it from behind bars.

Before I went in two years ago, I never paid attention to politics — I was always gone, busy with my work, life, and raising my kids. But in here, I have time to read my local paper, the Bangor News, every day, watch ABC or CBS, or listen to the radio. It’s been a pretty enlightening experience to learn all that has been going on that I never really paid attention to — how the government works and the laws are made, who gets to make the decisions, who gets to veto this, that, and the other. 

Before prison, I never really believed that my opinion counted for anything. But all that’s changed. Now I believe voting really does make a difference. I want to help elect somebody who looks out for the people and not for themselves. Who isn’t trying to get rich off of everybody. 

I care about issues like housing and health care for veterans — that’s my No. 1 right now. We shouldn’t have the same people who fought for our country be living in a tent on the side of the road. I also know some candidates are trying to help expand Medicare, Medicaid, which I think is a good thing. My mom is in her 80s and is starting to have health problems. Thank god she had Medicare. 

I really believe that trying to get an actionable national health care system going like what Canada has — even if they have to raise our taxes a little bit to do so — is a good thing. When I was a baby, I drank Drano. They replaced my esophagus with a piece of small intestine. They said, “If he lives, you pay the doctor bills. If he dies, don’t worry about it.” I know all about medical bills.

When it comes to how I will vote, we have a lady who works here as the community programs coordinator and helps us with paperwork, helps it get sent in and notarized. The facility is 100 percent behind her helping us all get set up to send in our ballots. The registration process itself is kind of complicated — I sent it in once and had the wrong address. The next time, I forgot to sign somewhere. Now I have everything filled out correctly, so it should be good to go. I’ve already successfully gotten my ballot and mailed it in.

When I signed up to vote, a couple of friends of mine said, “Oh, yeah, that’s a good idea!” And they signed up right behind me. At least 10 or 12 others in my pod will be voting, out of 32. If that’s an average across the prison, it’s about a third of the population. 

To be honest, I feel pretty mixed about the fact that I can vote as an incarcerated person. On one hand, we’re in here, so I guess in the eyes of society, we should’ve lost all of our rights. I do understand that — but on the other hand, whoever’s voted in as president will be my president when I’m free next year. Maybe if I was in here 20 years, then no, I shouldn’t have anything to do with the election. But I’ll be living as a free man under the next administration that is elected. I feel I should get a say in who I want to represent me. If I can do that, I’m better off for it. And I think the country will be better off for it. Other prisoners in the facility would be better off for it, too. They are people as well.

I have to be honest, though: We don’t need someone in office who is like me — who can’t speak, who can’t think quick enough. But we also don’t need someone who is putting all his personal business on Twitter or Facebook. I care about straightforwardness. Whoever I think is just trying to shoot the other guy down is the guy I won’t be voting for.

I’m pretty excited to vote for the first time, not just when it comes to the national government but in local government. And when I get out, I should still have my rights: to take action. To be able to vote. To be able to do anything — except for crimes, of course.

This whole process has actually inspired me. In prison, you have a lot of time on your hands. I’m taking classes to try to improve myself, like a construction and carpentry trade class, the NCCER welding program, the WorkReady program. I have a job in here, too: I do the laundry for those who have minimum-security status. And now I’m casting my choice for who I think should run the country when I get out.

Now that I’m educating myself more — about politics, about how the world works — my days in here are more interesting. The day I stop learning is the day I die.

As told to Hope Reese.

As the Covid-19 pandemic sweeps through the nation, thousands of nursing homes are locking down.

Following an outbreak at a Kirkland, Washington, nursing home associated with the deaths of 25 people, retirement and care homes have been on high alert, especially since coronavirus mortality rates for the elderly are relatively high. Many are shutting their doors to outside visitors, limiting personnel, and canceling nearly all social gatherings. For nursing home residents who already struggle with loneliness, the complete ban on visits from loved ones, Saturday afternoon bingo, and religious services is a massive blow. 

These bans are obviously upsetting, but know that these decisions are not being made lightly. I’m a chaplain intern at a nursing home, and while we haven’t been hit with coronavirus yet, we are preparing for the worst. And that means keeping our elderly residents healthy beyond their physical well-being. Right now, a rotation of silly jokes, as well as hand sanitizer, have become an integral part of my spiritual praxis.

Technically speaking, many nursing homes are well-equipped to handle a deadly virus. With more than 90 percent of the deaths associated with your standard seasonal flu occurring among the elderly, there are rigorous response protocols in place to contain the spread of disease. Flu shots are mandatory for all staff, there are hand sanitizer stations around every corner, and staff and volunteers with symptoms of the flu are asked to stay home. If the flu finds its way in, the infected resident and those with whom the patient has been in recent contact are isolated. After so many years of flu protocol, nursing staffs are practiced in containment.

But with the emergence of the novel coronavirus, restrictions are tightening. At the facility where I work, all staff, visitors, and volunteers are being scanned at the entrance for fevers and asked not to enter if they have symptoms such as coughing or trouble breathing, or if they (or anyone they cohabitate with) have traveled out of the country in the past two weeks. Communal worship gatherings have been canceled until further notice, and chaplains are instructed to broadcast Sunday services on closed-circuit television, available to each resident in their room. Visits from school children and other volunteer groups have been indefinitely postponed. 

Social distancing is crucial at this time, but it also exacerbates a known crisis faced by all nursing homes: loneliness. It is sadly very common for patients and residents in care facilities to feel abandoned by their living relatives who, unable to provide the round-the-clock care they require, put them in homes. And it is also not unusual for residents in their 90s and beyond to have actually outlived all of their friends and relatives, including, in many instances, their own children.

Compounding this loneliness is the likelihood that spouses and children of patients won’t be allowed to visit their loved ones in the weeks to come. We’ve all seen photos on the news of people knocking on nursing home windows, trying to see their elderly family members through the glass barrier. Even within homes that offer different levels of geriatric care, spouses who regularly see their partners may not be able to visit for weeks, perhaps even months. Anyone with a heart knows how much it hurts to be kept apart from those you care about during a crisis. These will be trying times for thousands of seniors and their families.

These restrictions will also affect volunteers. Even before the pandemic, many assisted-living facilities throughout the country were suffering from a lack of those rare, kind-hearted souls who stop by for a friendly game of cards or to accompany wheelchair-bound residents on a walk outside. With the pandemic in full swing, such volunteers — many of whom are elderly themselves — are being asked to stay home. 

Soon, other opportunities to gather, such as chair yoga and afternoon bingo, will also likely be canceled. During these difficult and scary times, healthcare chaplains play a critical role, providing ongoing prayer, succor, and, most importantly, friendly companionship. Chaplains like me are considered by most facilities essential personnel and will likely continue to do our work even if the home is put in lockdown. Staff will also pull double-duty, ensuring residents’ physical health and safety as well as comforting their spirits.

For those concerned about relatives living in a care facility, don’t be afraid to reach out and check in. FaceTime and Skype are great options if patients are already set up, but know that the phone is likely the best way to get in touch and still the most cherished form of communication for many elderly residents. Busy staff will have very limited time during a pandemic to train residents on how to use computers and iPads. The most trusted communication channel remains the old-fashioned landline.

During the next few weeks and months, our health care system will be fully occupied with the critical mission of keeping our seniors alive. Nursing home staff have considerable practice in safeguarding the health of seniors during an outbreak. However, there’s plenty of work left ahead for the rest of us to ensure that our nation’s elderly and most vulnerable are never left feeling abandoned.

The writer currently interns at a nursing home. They are choosing not to reveal their name to protect their privacy.

When a conference full of attendees from foreign countries came to a hotel near the establishment where I worked, I was worried I wasn’t going to be able to pay my rent that month.

The reason? I’m a bartender who works for tips, and when I serve patrons from countries who don’t know about American tipping culture, I don’t get paid. I don’t blame my customers, who probably believed we were being paid professional wages just like waiters in their countries. They didn’t know that I was depending on their tips to earn a living wage. It ended up being a bad week for everyone in the restaurant.

This kind of story isn’t unusual. It’s why as a bartender, I support a full minimum wage for tipped restaurant workers. And as such laws make their way onto ballots in states across the nation, including New York, it’s more important than ever to get the word out about why we must fix the current system.

I work in a trendy and bustling neighborhood in downtown Washington, DC, my home for nearly two decades. I’ve been working in the city’s restaurant industry for seven years, starting off as a hostess and now working as a bartender. This Tuesday, DC heads to the polls to decide whether restaurants should be required to pay staff a $15 minimum wage; under the current system, staff make a sub-minimum wage and are expected to make up the rest of their salary with tips. Many of my co-workers and I voted yes on this initiative, which passed in June but could be overturned by the DC City Council. This law will help all tipped workers, the majority of whom struggle to make ends meet.

I’m not going to use my real name for this essay. My support for this law, called Initiative 77, means I face retaliation at the restaurant where I work. Our leadership opposes it because they say the increased labor cost would make it impossible for them to maintain their current level of service to patrons and that they’ll increase prices to accommodate this.

Some of my industry colleagues have come out strongly against minimum wage because of the deceptive rhetoric and propaganda of their employers who are telling them they won’t be able to stay open due to increased costs. Fearmongering of the loss of livelihood has caused many to engage in vitriolic rhetoric against anyone who is perceived as a threat. Patrons have been shouted at and complete strangers attacked and targeted online for their views. Friendships have been lost and professional careers have been put in jeopardy, all due to us supporting one fair wage.

Additionally, restaurant workers in the opposition have organized to give the illusion that they speak for the whole. But the lines of division on this issue are driven in part by class — restaurant workers in high-end, high-volume establishments in wealthier areas of the city can expect generous tips in a way that workers in lower-end, lower-volume establishments simply can’t.

Should the law take effect, it would provide greater economic security for DC’s roughly 29,000 tipped workers. Currently, employers are only required to pay a “tipped sub-minimum wage” — a pitiful $3.33 an hour — as long as when customers’ tips are added, the workers receive at least the full minimum wage. This is an antiquated pay model that’s been frozen in time for more than 20 years.  

Wage theft by employers is real in this city, and those most impacted are almost always people like me: People of color, foreign-born, and female workers make up 66 percent of the restaurant industry’s workforce. A minimum wage would reduce these abusive instances by gradually eliminating the unjust two-tier wage system for tipped workers. Here in DC, initiative 77 would require that employers pay all workers the full minimum wage of $15 by 2026.

Surviving off tips is highly unreliable

As an industry veteran, I know what it means to survive off tips, not a salary. It’s incredibly difficult. Our managers are benefiting from cheap labor and passing the cost off to the patron when restaurant owners and managers can and should be paying their staff a fair wage. It means that owners and managers minimize their liabilities while pushing risk onto tipped workers like me. 

Living on tips does not guarantee me a sufficient income or economic security. Tipped workers experience a poverty rate nearly twice that of other workers. Currently, the median hourly wage for servers in DC is only $11.89. Even with tips included, many of my colleagues in this business still cannot make ends meet. In a city like DC, it’s estimated that one needs to make more than $80,000 a year to afford the rent of a studio apartment, groceries, and ordinary living expenses, so clearly, these earnings just won’t cut it for most of us.

Lots of variables impact my ability to make tips. If the weather is bad, fewer people dine at our restaurant, meaning I take home less. One restaurant owner I worked for stole my tips. I am one of the few success stories who was able to get my stolen wages back by going through the Department of Employment Services, but it was an emotionally draining process. (That restaurant owner is still operating.) And let’s not forget that, statistically speaking, people of color like me are often tipped less due to racist stereotypes.

Relying on customer tips results in unpredictable income and makes workers more vulnerable to being sexually harassed or discriminated against by the very customers on whose tips we depend. A business model where we rely almost entirely on the whim of customers to supply our income is inherently one-sided. That means when a patron is having a bad day, I could end up going home without the money I earned. Many of us do.

Industry leaders are circulating falsehoods that the industry will fail or workers will lose their tips if a minimum wage passes. But this law allows workers to receive a higher base wage plus tips, which results in higher total earnings for tipped workers. This isn’t some wild new idea: Seven states already make employers pay tipped workers the full minimum wage. Not only do patrons in those states still tip, but those workers are getting paid, on average, a higher wage than in non-minimum wage states.

And contrary to the restaurant industry’s claims, paying tipped workers the full minimum wage does not reduce growth. The restaurant industry itself predicts higher growth rates in states that passed a similar law compared to those with sub-minimum wages. Cities like San Francisco and Seattle, which are both raising their minimum wage to $15 an hour, have thriving restaurant industries. This will be a better deal not just for me but for everyone.

DC has a fantastic and profitable restaurant scene that continues to add jobs in full-service and fast-casual restaurants. But if these jobs are going to put DC workers like me on the path to the middle class, they need to pay the full minimum wage plus tips.

Anonymous is a bartender in Washington, DC.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

Eight years into our marriage, sitting in a therapist’s office with my husband, I mustered all my courage and said my deepest, darkest truth: “When we have sex, I feel like I’m being violated.” The unwanted sex at times made me sick: Once I had to run straight from bed to the bathroom, where I retched into the toilet. I spared him and the therapist that detail.

My husband shrugged and, staring ahead with more indifference than disdain, replied, “She’s always so melodramatic.” His response didn’t surprise me. It was his standard reaction to my complaints about the sad state of our marriage, his way of training me to see my needs — emotional connection and communication — as excessive, and his (primarily sex) as entirely reasonable.  

I had dragged us to couples counseling because I could no longer live in the vacuum left behind after the emotional intimacy had seeped out of our marriage. My husband hadn’t noticed the loss, proclaiming himself happy. At home, having tried without success the therapist-prescribed exercises for restoring emotional connection — check-ins about feelings, “nonsexual” touch — my husband lobbied for his own solution: “The thing you need is really complicated and difficult, and it’s not something I can do. But the thing I need is easy and quick. Why can’t you just give me the thing I need?”

I acquiesced. At the time, it didn’t feel like a choice; it felt inevitable. I lived every evening dreading the signals of my husband’s desire. I bargained my way out of sex as often as I could. I gloried in being sick enough to have the right to refuse.

On the nights when I couldn’t get out of it, we used a method that I had taught myself to tolerate and that he, astoundingly, tolerated as well: I read a book to distract myself for as long as I could while he did the thing he needed to do. I did not let him kiss me for the last several years of our marriage. That was the rule: You can fuck me, but you can’t kiss me, and I don’t have to pretend to like it. This satisfied him.

Submitting to sex with a man who knew it was unwanted, who knew I felt deep pain at our lack of emotional connection, and who knew — who had been clearly told — that it felt like a violation, broke something in me. Knowing that he could still enjoy and feel emotionally fulfilled by that unwanted sex shattered my idea of our marriage. I felt like a sex doll. I felt unselfed.

But I blamed myself. I was the one whose desire was “deficient,” according to my husband and our sex-obsessed culture. When multiple couples therapists over several years made no significant impact, I blamed myself again: I should have been more forceful when I said my dark truth.

Only 15 years later, as I witness so much outrage on the behalf of women who have been shamed, coerced, and bullied into sex in so many other contexts, do I wonder: How could my husband listen to me say what I said — even once, even timidly — and sleep well that night, much less continue to insist on sleeping with me?

Our culture condones sexual misconduct in marriage

Reactions to my marital experience will likely depend on the reader’s age — which reflects the enormous evolution that the legal and social definitions of appropriate sexual behavior have undergone over the past 50 years. Marital rape was legal everywhere in the US until the mid-1970s and was not outlawed in all 50 states until the 1990s. Even today, it is not prosecuted as harshly as rape outside marriage.

These facts tell me that I matured from child to college graduate in a country where men “owned” their wives so completely that they could commit sexual violence on them with legal impunity. In that context, my acquiescence begins to make sense — even though my educational and professional background ensured I knew, intellectually, I was entitled to refuse sex.

I am a humanities professor who teaches feminist theory, models feminist behavior for my students and my own children, and has achieved success in a male-dominated field. Last year, my teenage son and I chanted in support of women’s reproductive rights at the Women’s March in Washington. And yet for years I submitted to unwanted sex from my husband, leaving me sexually traumatized long after I ended that marriage. All the feminist texts I had read could not drown out what I had absorbed from society and popular culture: that it was my duty to satisfy my husband, regardless of my own feelings.

Countless movies and TV shows — including this year’s Best Picture, The Shape of Water — have used the shot of a husband jackhammering away above his blank-faced wife as shorthand for a stale marriage. But nowhere do we ask what it would feel like to be that woman, night after night, or whether the husband’s insistence might even be a kind of assault.

In private conversation, nearly every woman with whom I have broached this subject has shared stories — her own, a friend’s, or both — about suffering unwanted sex in marriage. And yet despite the #MeToo movement, the heated discussion around the New Yorker’s “Cat Person” short story, and the Aziz Ansari debate, the subject of sexual misconduct in marriage has not arisen in our public discourse.

The majority of sexual encounters in America take place in marriage. Half of adults in America are married, and married or cohabiting people have sex twice as often as single people. Do we believe there is no painfully “bad sex,” coercion, or sexual assault in marriage? If we do recognize the prevalence of these things, why aren’t we talking about it?

Defending yourself against sexual assault in a marriage is uniquely difficult

The questions about what constitutes consent and assault raised by the Babe.net article about Aziz Ansari become only more disturbing in the context of marriage. In the New York Times, opinion writer Bari Weiss wrote of “Grace,” who had the disturbing encounter with Ansari, “If you are hanging out naked with a man, it’s safe to assume he is going to try to have sex with you.” But what if you lie next to that man every night, and prefer to sleep naked? Should he assume your body is perpetually available to him for sex?

Weiss advised, “If he pressures you to do something you don’t want to do, use a four-letter word, stand up on your two legs and walk out his door.” But what if you know the “pressures” will never stop, and the only way you can escape them is to leave a lifelong relationship? And what if “his door” is also yours?

Leaving a marriage is much harder than calling an Uber. It requires breaking up a family, and deciding that avoiding unwanted sex is worth giving up half the time you would have spent with your kids. It means financial turmoil from which you might never fully recover. If you have kids, it may mean incurring the wrath of the person with whom you will be required to co-parent for decades, and so it also may mean losing his family, whom you love but who will no longer love you because you have hurt their darling boy. How do you assert your agency when its price is the pain of others? 

The issue at hand is not about Aziz Ansari, or about any one man. It is about that “emotional setting” Lindy West wrote of in the Times, quoting feminist activist Susan Brownmiller, in which women feel unable or not allowed to resist male sexual overtures. The institution of marriage provides a prefab version of the setting West describes. It gives a man years to accomplish the emotional manipulation that men on dates must squeeze into an evening. How can we consider such a persistent campaign for a woman’s compliance anything but assault?

Because marriage is sanctified, by your community if not also by your god; because it is now widely understood as a bond of love, not a social or financial codification; because in it, our expectation for female caretaking and reverence for male sexual desire meet in the gospel of a woman’s “sacrifice”; and because of the dangerous myth of postfeminism — we have come to see marriage as a relationship that is not about power, in which women cannot feel sexually violated or dehumanized.

Only when women say otherwise — in public debate, but also to each other, and to their partners, sons, and daughters — will we confront how the institution of marriage can hide damaging behavior that we’ve begun to question in so many other settings.

This writer has chosen to remain anonymous to protect everyone involved in this article.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.