Site Network: Prison Policy Initiative | Prisoners of the Census
Rural residents who live in the same community as a prison, but not in its district, have their voting power severely diluted. Colorado, Mississippi, New Jersey and Virginia encourage or require counties to exclude prison populations from county level redistricting, however, and many communities across the nation have taken the initiative to correct the problem themselves. They correct the Census data manually so that they can redistrict and maintain residents' equal representation.
For the last two years we've published examples of communities that have subtracted the prison population when redrawing their districts. Over the next year, we will investigate redistricting pratices in several hundred more communities and publish our findings, in the hopes that more rural communities will correct the Census data prior to redistricting.
The best introduction to the local issues is a letter that three residents of rural Franklin County, New York, sent to the Census Bureau's Redistricting Data Program in 2004.
We've analyzed the damage to democracy in these counties:
and in these cities and towns:
Prisoners: North County Residents? is an interesting radio piece that compares two neighboring counties, one that includes the prisoners and one that excludes them. By David Sommerstein, North County Public Radio (New York), March 5, 2004 (transcript)