Voters and Community groups intervene in suit to ensure that all New Yorkers are equally represented in state and local legislatures
May 17, 2011
Voters and Community Groups Intervening in Suit to Ensure that All New Yorkers Are Equally Represented in State and Local Legislatures
Contact:
| Brennan Center for Justice |
Jeanine Plant-Chirlin |
(646) 292-8322 |
jeanine.plant-chirlin@nyu.edu |
| Center for Law & Social Justice |
April Silver |
(718) 756-8501 |
pr@akilaworksongs.com |
| Demos |
Lauren Strayer |
(212) 633-1413 |
lstrayer@demos.org |
| LatinoJustice |
John Garcia |
(212) 739-7513 |
jgarcia@latinojustice.org |
| NAACP-LDF |
Melquiades Gagarin |
(212) 965-2783 |
mgagarin@naacpldf.org |
| NYCLU |
Michael Cummings |
(212) 607-3300 x363 |
mcummings@nyclu.org |
| Prison Policy Initiative |
Peter Wagner |
(413) 527-0845 |
pwagner@prisonpolicy.org |
Albany, NY – Today, top civil rights organizations filed a motion in New York Supreme Court asking to intervene to help defend New York’s new law allocating people in prison to their home communities for redistricting and reapportionment.
The Brennan Center for Justice, the Center for Law and Social Justice, Demos, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the New York Civil Liberties Union, and the Prison Policy Initiative, representing fifteen rural and urban voters and three statewide nonprofit organizations, are seeking to defend the new law against a legal challenge brought by New York State Senator Elizabeth Little and others. The lawsuit, titled Little v. LATFOR, names the New York State Task Force on Demographic Research and Reapportionment (LATFOR) and the Department of Correctional Services (DOCS) as defendants.
The new law requires that incarcerated persons be counted as residents of their home communities, in accordance with the New York State Constitution’s provision that incarceration does not change one’s residence. The legislation applies to state and local legislative redistricting, and would not affect federal funding distributions.
Previously, legislative districts with prisons were credited with the population of the disenfranchised people temporarily incarcerated there. This practice, often called prison-based gerrymandering, gives extra influence to voters who live in the district with the most prisons, and dilutes the votes of every resident of a district with no (or fewer) prisons. The new law corrects this bias and assures that all communities in New York have equal representation in our government.
The most dramatic examples of prison-based gerrymandering are in upstate counties and cities. For example, half of a Rome City Council ward is incarcerated, giving the residents of that ward twice the influence of other city residents. Recognizing the distorting effect of prison-based gerrymandering at the local level, thirteen New York counties with large prisons – including four in Senator Little’s district – have historically exercised their discretion to remove the prison populations prior to redistricting.
The new law brings consistency to redistricting in New York, prohibiting the state and all local governments from giving extra political influence to districts that contain prisons. Sen. Little’s lawsuit seeks to have the new legislation struck down, the effect of which would require legislative districts – most notably her own, which contains 12,000 incarcerated persons – to include prison populations in their apportionment counts to the detriment of all other districts without prisons. Returning to this practice would not only unfairly inflate the districts of those with prisons at the expense of those without but also violate the New York State Constitution.
The organizations seeking to intervene include:
- The NAACP New York State Conference, the state-level body in New York of the NAACP, a membership organization dedicated to protecting and enhancing the civil rights of African Americans and other people of color. The Conference has approximately 90,000 members statewide. “Persons incarcerated in correctional institutions do not participate in the life of the town or county where they are incarcerated,” said Hazel Dukes, president of the NAACP New York State Conference. “Sen. Little and her co-plaintiffs are seeking to reverse one of New York’s most important civil rights advances in the previous decade, which would unfairly dilute the voting rights of New Yorkers in every corner of the state.”
- Common Cause / NY, the New York branch of Common Cause, a nationwide, nonpartisan organization with 20,000 members in New York State that advocates for honest, accountable, and responsive government. “The way legislative district lines are drawn impacts citizens’ ability to participate effectively in our democracy,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause / NY. “Prison-based gerrymandering is a fundamentally unfair practice whose end was met with overwhelming applause. Voters in every region of the state would be hurt by a repeal of the new law.”
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Voices of Community Activists and Leaders – New York, or VOCAL -NY, a statewide grassroots membership organization building power among low-income people who are living with and affected by HIV/AIDS, drug use and incarceration, along with the organizations that serve them, to create healthy and just communities. “Many of our members live in communities that are heavily impacted by the criminal justice system and have a disproportionate number of residents sent to state prison,” said Ramon Velasquez, a VOCAL-NY leader. “Every district that has fewer prisons than Senator Little’s district loses representation from prison-based gerrymandering, but the districts that see many of their members counted in prison lose even more.”
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The Times Union ran commentary critical of a lawsuit seeking to bring prison-based gerrymandering back to New York while the DOJ approved the new law.
by Aleks Kajstura,
May 17, 2011
The New York Daily News reports that the law ending prison-based gerrymandering in the state passed the Department of Justice’s review.
The Justice Department’s pre-clearance of the law does not, however, deter the law’s opponents. The Times Union published commentary written by Ekow N. Yankah, an assistant law professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and Leonard Kohen, an election law and voting rights attorney. The writers discussed a lawsuit aimed to return prison-based gerrymandering to New York.
The senators’ lawsuit challenges the law as giving unequal treatment to “different classes” of voters. Further, they argue that because the state Constitution allegedly contains no specific provisions for how to count prisoners in the census, a constitutional amendment was required to enact the law.
They can support their arguments only by distorting the state constitution. First, the constitution, in the very section that they cite in their complaint (Article III, section 4), allows the state to use other information where the federal census data is not precise or adequate for apportioning electoral districts.
Second and most directly, both the constitution and state election law explicitly guarantee that, for voting purposes, no one shall be deemed to have lost his or her residence while confined in prison. Thus, the premise of their lawsuit flatly contravenes the state constitution.
The constitution has always been clear that prisoners remain residents of their pre-incarceration addresses for voting purposes, and for the first time our state redistricting procedures will be in compliance. Indeed, nowhere in the lawsuit do the senators mention that before the enactment of the law that they are challenging, the majority of New York’s counties that have large prisons refused to use the prison populations in drawing their country districts.
Shapefiles and online databases make it even easier to use the Census Bureau's group quarters data in the redistricting process.
by Peter Wagner,
May 17, 2011
Last month, the Census Bureau released the Census Bureau’s Advance Group Quarters Summary File, which for the first time identified which census blocks contain group quarters, such as correctional facilities, early enough that state and local redistricting bodies can choose to use this data to draw fair districts.
The day after the release, we announced a series of tools designed to make this data easier for redistricting professionals and advocates to use. To recap, we’ve made:
- A point shapefile with the group quarters counts for each block in the country: http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/data/2010/groupquartersshapefile.html The file contains the number of people in group quarters, and the number of people in different types of group quarters (including correctional facilities). Each blocks that contain a correctional facility includes a URL that links to our database of block annotations.
- A county-searchable database of census blocks that contain correctional facilities and our annotations. The data is viewable in tabular and Google maps formats at: http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/locator2010
For more advanced uses, including preliminary research for Count Question Resolution appeals and determining which blocks should be adjusted prior to redistricting, we’ve made available databases of state, federal, and local correctional facilities and their populations on dates as close to Census day as possible and as well as a memo about new large correctional facilities that were built over the last decade. These resources may be particularly helpful if a block that is of interest to you isn’t yet annotated in our database. These tools are at: http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/data/
- Finally, we’ve written two introductions to the data and its uses:
We hope these tools help you draw fairer districts. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about these tools.
Maryland releases redistricting data, adjusted to avoid prison-based gerrymandering in the state.
by Aleks Kajstura,
May 4, 2011
Maryland just released its “Green Report” of redistricting data, adjusted to prevent prison-based gerrymandering in the state.
The Maryland Department of Planning announces:
The report, released jointly by the Maryland Departments of Planning, Legislative Services, and Public Safety and Correctional Services, contains tables of population counts for the 1,849 voting districts, or precincts, in Maryland’s 23 counties and Baltimore City. The counts were derived from the 2010 Census. Also, for the first time, the data was adjusted for the purposes of creating Congressional, State Legislative and local districting plans in accordance with the “No Representation Without Population Act,” signed into Maryland law in 2010. This law requires that census data be adjusted to reassign Maryland residents in correctional institutions to their last known address and to exclude out-of-state residents in correctional institutions for the purposes of the redistricting count.
The Green Report is available through the Maryland redistricting website, which contains additional population tables for the report as well as other data, FAQs and other tools to make the Maryland redistricting process accessible to the public.
California bill to end prison-based gerrymandering introduced by Assembly Member Davis; Dale Ho of the LDF testified in support.
by Aleks Kajstura,
May 3, 2011
Assembly Member Davis recently introduced legislation to end prison-based gerrymandering in California. AB 420, An act to add Section 21003 to the Elections Code, relating to redistricting, received the support of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) in testimony today.
Formal resolutions and recommendations from organizations and legislative bodies regarding prison-based gerrymandering are now compiled on our site.
by Aleks Kajstura,
April 29, 2011
Many organizations and legislative bodies have made formal resolutions and recommendations critical of the Census Bureau’s prison count and condemning the practice of prison-based gerrymandering.
Our resolutions page gathers these resolutions from organizations like the NAACP, the Census Bureau’s own Advisory Committee, city councils and other local governments. This new page also has some sample resolutions that are a great starting-point for introducing a resolution in your organization or town, city, county or state legislature.
Hale County Judge Bill Coleman will avoid prison-based gerrymandering in redrawing the district lines for the County.
by Aleks Kajstura,
April 28, 2011
One more county in Texas will now avoid prison-based gerrymandering, making sure that no resident is given extra clout just because they share a district with a prison. The Plainview Daily Herald reports: County judge will not consider prison population in county redistricting:
[Hale County Judge Bill] Coleman, who began his first term in January, acknowledged that he was stunned when he learned that fact, given that prisoners are convicted felons and cannot vote, and even if they could their place of legal residence is where they are from, not where they are incarcerated.
“It made no sense to me,” Coleman said.
…
[L]ocal Census data will include local prison populations, and that data isn’t always easy to find. The result is that either by accident or through unscrupulous motive, local governmental agencies will include those numbers of ineligible voters in their redistricting plans.
While accidental inclusion is a problem…, intentional inclusion can be a way to gerrymander voting precincts to achieve a certain goal.
…
For Coleman, the inclusion of the prison population in Hale County’s redistricting plan has never been an option, though. He made that clear when the issue first came up during a regular commissioners court meeting earlier this month, and he has not changed his position.
“There would be no justifiable reason for including the prison population,” he said in a recent interview.
New York Times editorial calls for court to uphold law banning prison-based gerrymandering.
by Aleks Kajstura,
April 25, 2011
The New York Times has issued a strong editorial critical of state lawmakers who are challenging a law that bans prison-based gerrymandering. For more on the lawsuit, see last week’s newsletter and our blog. For our research cited in the editorial, see the New York Campaign page on our website.
Census Bureau released the Advance Group Quarters data, and our free tools make it easy to use to identify prison populations in redistricting data.
by Peter Wagner,
April 22, 2011
The Census Bureau released the Advance Group Quarters yesterday — earlier than expected — and many have been eagerly awaiting this data so that they can identify prison populations in the redistricting data and avoid prison-based gerrymandering.
The Prison Policy Initiative, in partnership with Demos, issued a press release about the Advance Group Quarters File yesterday. A copy of the press release can be found below.
Late last night, the Prison Policy Initiative finished translating the Bureau’s data in to some user-friendlier formats, including:
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A national shapefile with all of the group quarters data
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Block level tables of the correctional facilities searchable by county
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Google maps of the blocks that contain facilities
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Connecting the new census data to a database of annotations of each of the 5,393 blocks that contain some kind of correctional facility.
These tools are available at http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/data/. Our next conference call workshop to discuss how to use this data to avoid prison-based gerrymandering will be at 10am eastern on Tuesday April 26.
New Data Will Boost State and Local Efforts to Draw Fairer Districts
April 20, 2011
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE April 20, 2011
CONTACT:
Tim Rusch, trusch@demos.org, (212) 389-1307
Peter Wagner, pwagner@prisonpolicy.org, (413) 527-0845
Aleks Kajstura, akajstura@prisonpolicy.org, (413) 527-0845
Anna Pycior, apycior@demos.org, (212) 389-1408
Advocates Hail Census Bureau’s Release of Data to Assist in Correcting Prison-Based Gerrymandering;
New Data Will Boost State and Local Efforts to Draw Fairer Districts
New York, NY—Today, the Census Bureau released a new data product that will assist state and local governments in avoiding prison-based gerrymandering, a practice which unjustly gives districts that contain prisons extra representation in the legislature. The Bureau’s accelerated release of 2010 group quarters table was hailed by Demos and the Prison Policy Initiative, two national non-partisan organizations working on state and local redistricting reform.
Under most state constitutions and election law statutes, a prison cell is not a residence, but existing Census Bureau practices count incarcerated people as residents of the prison location.
As a result of discussions last year between Census Director Robert Groves and Rep. Wm. Lacy Clay, Jr., Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census and National Archives, the Census Bureau has now for the first time identified which census blocks contain group quarters, such as correctional facilities, early enough that state and local redistricting bodies can choose to use this data to draw fair districts.
In the past, states and counties that wished to correct this overrepresentation of districts with prisons had received little support from the Census Bureau, as the Bureau traditionally published the prison populations at the census block level long after redistricting is underway or completed.
“The Census Bureau has taken an important step toward recognizing the need for improved data on incarcerated populations so that states can end the practice of prison-based gerrymandering,” said Peter Wagner, Executive Director of the Prison Policy Initiative. “States and local governments that have been struggling to correct distorted redistricting figures are eagerly looking forward to this data.”
Advocates had earlier urged the Census to determine the home addresses of incarcerated people and count them there, but it was too late in the 2010 Census planning to change that. This interim solution of releasing accelerated data identifying prison populations will assist governments that wish to make their own adjustments for state and local redistricting. Legislation to make such adjustments was enacted last year in Maryland, New York and Delaware, and is currently under consideration in several states including in Illinois, Rhode Island and Oregon.
In past years, state legislative districts in many states have had prison populations large enough to run afoul of constitutional “one person, one vote” standards. Local county and municipal districts have seen even greater distortions, with many districts having more incarcerated people than voters. These states and localities can now more readily identify the prison populations before drawing district lines, and make appropriate adjustments to avoid distortions in representation.
“For too long, communities with large prisons have received greater representation in government on the backs of people who have no voting rights in the prison community and are not considered legal residents of the prison district for any other purpose. The Census Bureau’s new data will greatly assist states and localities in correcting this injustice and drawing fair and accurate districts that honor the principle of one person, one vote,” said Brenda Wright, Director of the Democracy Program at Demos.
While hailing the Census Bureau’s first step toward improving its practices on counting incarcerated persons, advocates are engaged in a longer-term campaign to encourage the Bureau to implement a more permanent solution under which the decennial census would count incarcerated persons at their home locations.
The new data has been published on the Census Bureau’s Redistricting Data Office website at http://www.census.gov/rdo. To make this data easier to use by redistricting professionals and democracy advocates, the Prison Policy Initiative will be producing shapefiles later today with the group quarters data and making a web-based database of annotations available to the public at http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/data/. In addition, Demos and PPI have a publication, Preventing Prison-Based Gerrymandering in Redistricting: What to Watch For, which provides guidance on how advocates and map-drawers can minimize the impact of prison-based gerrymandering when redrawing state and local district lines.
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