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.
Then just a couple of weeks before the Evenwel decision came down, a federal court struck down a redistricting plan in Jefferson County, Florida, deeming prison gerrymandering unconstitutional.
Now, at the request of the Judge in Davidson, Plaintiffs submitted a memorandum of law, summarizing the courts’ reasoning in Evenwel and Florida condemning prison gerrymandering. The request comes as both sides have pending requests to the court for a summary judgement; stay tuned for updates.
On Saturday, in a thorough 86 page opinion, Judge Walker of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida struck a blow to prison gerrymandering.
I’ll get to the decision in a minute, but first here’s some background. Each decade, state and local legislative districts are redrawn across the country to ensure that each district contains the same population as other districts. In this way, all residents are given the same access to representation and government. However, the Census Bureau’s practice of counting incarcerated people as residents of the prison location, instead of their home communities, results in significant distortions in achieving fair representation. As Judge Walker put it, “blind reliance on census data can lead to unconstitutional results.”
Over 200 local governments across the US avoid prison gerrymandering by refusing to use Census Bureau data that counts out-of-town people incarcerated there as if they were town residents. But Jefferson County in Florida bucked the trend, preferring to give the residents of District 3 the advantage of sharing their representatives with the disenfranchised people incarcerated in the state’s Jefferson Correctional Institution (JCI).
While all residents of all the other county board districts were harmed by artificially inflating the population of district 3, the prison gerrymandering resulted in particularly harsh impact on the African-American community in the County. The ACLU of Florida and the Florida Justice Institute brought the suit to correct these inequalities.
The judge struck down the prison-gerrymandered redistricting plan and has ordered the county to redistrict based on population data that doesn’t count the people in the state prison as if they were all residents of District 3 (of the 1,157 people incarcerated at JCI, about 9 are Jefferson residents at all). The new plan could allow for a Black influence district in addition to the current Black majority district.
The opinion concludes, summarizing:
Defendants argue vigorously that excluding the JCI inmates from the population base for districting purposes would be “arbitrary.” The opposite is true—including them in the population base is arbitrary. The inmates at JCI, unlike aliens, children, etc. living in Jefferson County, are not meaningfully affected by the decisions of the Boards. To say they are “constituents” of the Board representatives from District 3 is to diminish the term constituent. To treat the inmates the same as actual constituents makes no sense under any theory of one person, one vote, and indeed under any theory of representative democracy. Furthermore, such treatment greatly dilutes the voting and representational strength of denizens in other districts. Jefferson County’s districting scheme for its Board of County Commissioners and School Board therefore violates the Equal Protection Clause. [Citations omitted.]
The opinion is eminently readable; it includes a systematic overview of redistricting case law, including a reminder that none of us technically have a “right to vote”, to a thorough analysis of prisoner-community relations (or lack there of). I promise the 86 pages fly by, you can read it for yourself.
And lastly, for anyone wondering about Judge Walker’s approach in relation to Evenwel, he “expresses no opinion” on the relative importance of electoral versus representational equality because prison gerrymandering serves neither goal.
Bills to end prison gerrymandering have been introduced in Rhode Island (H 7400, introduced by Representatives Williams, Regunberg, Ajello, Costa, and Lombardi, and S 2310, introduced by Senators Metts, Crowley, Jabour, Pichardo, and Doyle). Similar bills have passed the State’s Senate twice before, maybe this will be the year that the issue of equal representation will earn the House’s support as well.
And growing media attention to the issue in Connecticut — following a February 10 press conference sponsored by a growing coalition of activists — is adding urgency to the legislative agenda in the state, which is poised to follow their neighbor soon.
As we pass the middle of the decade and the Census Bureau is getting ready for the 2020 Census, Rome NY has finally completed their 2010 redistricting, and with it, ended decades of prison gerrymandering. The new lines for the City Council wards went into effect in time for the fall elections, and the elected councilors just started their new terms of office last month.
The city might sound familiar (and not just because it shares a name with Italy’s capital) – Rome’s City Council wards were one of New York State’s worst examples of prison gerrymandering. About half of the population that the Census counted in Ward 2 was actually mostly out-of-town people incarcerated in the prisons located there. This stark population inequality in Rome’s wards illustrated the absurdity of pretending that 1=2 when it came to allotting representation.
Prison gerrymandering is often pigeonholed as an urban issue, resulting in a lack of interest or opposition from legislators representing rural areas. Rome served as an example to bridge that gap; in fact, six years ago this week, the Utica Observer called on the state to end prison gerrymandering, citing Rome among the prison gerrymandering examples in their area. In endorsing New York’s law to count incarcerated people as constituents in their home districts, the Utica Observer concluded simply: “It’s only fair.” Once the law passed, even the New York Times took note of Rome’s situation.
Now, five years after the State passed a law ending prison gerrymandering, the City, leaning on Oneida County for technical help, finally redrew their City Council wards using redistricting data prepared by the state (LATFOR). The LATFOR data, which adjusted the population data that the state received from the Census Bureau, counts incarcerated people at home.
For Rome, this means that the redistricting data now reflects the city’s actual population. The Census Bureau had counted people incarcerated at the Mohawk and Oneida facilities as if they were actual residents of the city. This incarcerated population accounted for half of the people in the city’s Ward 2. A year later, the State closed the Oneida facility, spreading its occupants across the state’s other prisons, meaning the Census data was stretched even further from reality. The LATFOR data helped the city avoid these “phantom constituents” skewing their redistricting data, ensuring that all city Councilors now have an equal number of constituents in their district.
While cities like Rome — and their residents — benefit from state laws that adjust the Census Bureau’s flawed data, not everyone is so lucky. The Census Bureau should count incarcerated people at home in the first place, rather than leaving the data clean-up to states, let alone individual cities and counties.
Rome City Councilor, Frank Anderson (5th Ward), explains the city’s protracted redistricting saga:
As we pass the middle of the decade and the Census Bureau is getting ready for the 2020 Census, 
