Help End Prison Gerrymandering Prison gerrymandering funnels political power away from urban communities to legislators who have prisons in their (often white, rural) districts. More than two decades ago, the Prison Policy Initiative put numbers on the problem and sparked the movement to end prison gerrymandering.
Jeff Reichert has posted the screening schedule for the Gerrymandering film. With a national theatrical release on October 15, select showings before then, and more dates being added all the time, Gerrymandering will be near you soon.
From the official summary:
A wake-up-call documentary that exposes the hidden history of our country’s redistricting wars, mapping battles that take place out of public scrutiny but that shape the electoral landscape of American politics for decades at time, posing a threat not just to democrats and republicans, but democracy as a whole. Right now, across the country, our two major political parties are gearing up for a once-a-decade war whose winner will control Congress for the next ten years, and possibly more. There will be battles in every state, and each will be kept carefully hidden from the prying eyes of average voters who only become more disenchanted with their government with each meaningless election. Democrats and Republicans collude to keep these skirmishes private so that they can maintain total control over the ultimate political weapon: the ability to directly determine the outcome of elections. Why bother stuffing ballots when they can just draw districts? For the first time, Gerrymandering exposes the most effective form of manipulating elections short of outright fraud. After the 2010 Census is finished, will you know where your district went?
It’s a great film, but our favorite part is the film’s treatment of prison-based gerrymandering. In February, I traveled with Director Jeff Reichert and Field Producer Susan Bryant to Anamosa Iowa where 96% of a city council district was incarcerated. We meet the City Councilor who won the election with only 2 votes cast, and we discuss why the city changed its form of government to eliminate the prison district. See a clip:
Jenigh Garrett of the NAACP LDF will talk about prison-based gerrymandering on the first panel “Race, Reform and Independent Redistricting Commissions.” The agenda features a number of the leading experts and commentators on prison-based gerrymandering, including Dale Ho, Brenda Wright, Nate Persily and Pamela Karlan. They will appear on various panels and speak about the role of the Voting Rights Act in redistricting, the importance of recognizing diversity in the context of redistricting, and strategies for safeguarding minority voting rights.
I’ll be in attendance and am looking forward to seeing you there!
Frank Green has an excellent story in the Richmond Times-Dispatch about the impact of prison-based gerrymandering in county government in Virginia. After the 2000 Census, the legislature passed a law allowing counties with census populations that are more than 12% incarcerated to exclude the prison population when drawing districts. Unfortunately, this left a number of counties with large prison populations ineligible for the new law and required to draw districts that give the prison districts extra influence.
In Southampton County, for example, the residents who live near the prison have more than twice the influence over county affairs as residents of other districts. Ideally, the legislature will change the law and allow all counties to exclude the prison populations from the districts if they wish.
I just received this press release from the Delaware House Majority announcing the governor’s signature of the bill ending prison-based gerrymandering. You can also read the bill or the Prison Policy Initiative / Demos press release from the bill’s passage.
Delaware House of Representatives House Majority Caucus
For Immediate Release:
Contact: Drew Volturo
September 1, 2010
Work: (302) 744-4001
Cell: (302) 593-5969
BILL ENSURING ACCURATE REDISTRICTING
COUNT SIGNED INTO LAW
Inmates would be counted at permanent residence instead of at correctional facility
WILMINGTON – Legislation ensuring that the population of each Delaware municipality and legislative district is accurately counted was signed into law on Tuesday afternoon.
Sponsored by Rep. Helene M. Keeley, House Bill 384 requires that inmates in a Delaware prison at the time of the decennial U.S. Census will be counted in the area they resided immediately prior to incarceration instead of being counted at the address of the correctional facility. Under the measure, the state would not be able to count prisoners who did not live in Delaware before they were incarcerated as part of the population. This would apply in determining the reapportionment and redistricting for the state.
The current practice of including prison populations in the districts in which the facilities are located artificially pads those districts and leaves inmates’ home districts under-represented. This skews research and demographic data that local governments and various groups use for planning purposes and to allocate resources.
“Most people who are in prison are not there for long periods of time,” said Rep. Keeley, D-Wilmington South. “When they are released, they often return to the communities they lived in before they were in prison. Having an accurate district population count helps government and nonprofit agencies plan and offer services more effectively.”
Maryland’s legislature passed its “No Representation Without Population Act” in April, becoming the first state to enact such a measure. New York State also passed a similar measure this summer.
According to the Prison Policy Initiative, which advocates for passage of such laws, four states (Colorado, Mississippi, New Jersey and Virginia) encourage or even require local governments to exclude prison populations during redistricting. The group also lists Wilmington as an example of cities throughout the country that are affected by prison-based gerrymandering.
The 2010 U.S. Census will determine more than just how many people live in a given regional area. Those numbers are also used when counties across the state of Alabama determine where district lines are drawn for government representation.
Escambia County makes determinations on those district lines based on actual residential population, unlike other counties that may use prison population as part of district residents.
Escambia County Administrator Tony Sanks said the population of prisons in the county is excluded when district lines are determined.
“The district lines in the county were redrawn in 2001 following the last Census,” Sanks said. “The prison count was not included when a determination was made on the number of residents living in a particular area were considered.”
Sanks said the reason for that is simple — prisons aren’t served by the county.
“We don’t serve the prison systems in any way so they simply are not included as constituents in a district,” Sanks said. “They maintain their own roads and take care of their own services. Since we don’t serve them, we don’t count them as part of a district.”
In my view, the ideal solution is for the Census Bureau to count incarcerated people at their home, not prison, addresses. But Escambia County’s solution is a good interim step that avoids giving some districts extra representation just because they happen to contain a large prison.
Guest:
Bruce Riley, organizer at Direct Action for Rights and Equality, Providence Rhode Island
Recorded: June, 2010, Aired: August 2010
Peter Wagner:
Welcome to Issues in Prison-Based Gerrymandering, a podcast about keeping the Census Bureau’s prison count from harming our democracy. The Census Bureau counts people in prison as if they were actual residents of their prison cells, even though most state laws say that people in prison are residents of their homes. When prison counts are used to pad legislative districts, the weight of a vote starts to differ. If you live next to a large prison, your vote is worth more than one cast in a district without prisons. Prison-based gerrymandering distorts state legislative districts and has been known to create county legislative districts that contain more prisoners than voters. On each episode, we’ll talk with different voting rights experts about ways in which state and local governments can change the census and avoid prison-based gerrymandering.
Our guest today is Bruce Riley, an organizer at DARE in Rhode Island, Direct Action for Rights and Equality. Bruce has been spearheading the campaign to end prison-based gerrymandering in Rhode Island. Welcome, Bruce.
Jeff Reichert has posted the screening schedule for the Gerrymandering film. With a national theatrical release on October 15, select showings before then, and more dates being added all the time, Gerrymandering will be near you soon.
For Immediate Release:
Play (21:24, 11.3MB)
The New York Times cites our research on prison-based gerrymandering in the 
