Who wants to bring prison-based gerrymandering back to New York?

Somebody wants to bring prison-based gerrymandering back to New York. But who? It's not upstate counties or upstate newspapers.

by Peter Wagner, April 5, 2011

Somebody wants to bring prison-based gerrymandering back to New York. But who?

It’s not the 13 upstate New York counties that have historically rejected the idea of using prison populations to pad some legislative districts with prisons at the expense of all other districts. In fact, one of those counties even passed a local law declaring that:

“Persons incarcerated in state and federal correctional institutions live in a separate environment, do not participate in the life of Essex County and do not affect the social and economic character of the towns…. The inclusion of these federal and state correctional facility inmates unfairly dilutes the votes or voting weight of persons residing in other towns within Essex County….”

It’s not the editorial board of the Times Herald-Record in Orange County New York which editorialized that:

“… a politician should be embarrassed to claim that people held in prisons should count as constituents.”

And it’s not the editorial board of the Observer-Dispatch in Oneida County, which was outraged to learn about the extent of prison-based gerrymandering in local city and county government:

“In January, it was reported that the 6,000-plus prison inmates at Oneida County’s four prisons are factored into population totals for county legislative districts in Marcy and Rome. Meanwhile, in the city of Rome, nearly half the people in the Second Ward are prisoners. That means a non-prisoner in the Second Ward has twice the clout on the Common Council over a resident in another part of the city. That’s wrong.”

The paper ended their editorial with an unsuccessful call for a particular important person to support New York’s landmark law to end prison-based gerrymandering.

So if the upstate county governments think prison-based gerrymandering is a bad idea, and if the upstate editorial boards think prison-based gerrymandering is unfair, is there any group that may have a different perspective?

The video below explains which group sees enough self-interest in prison-based gerrymandering to want to file a lawsuit to bring back the repugnant practice:

“Illinois Issues” covers bill to end prison-based gerrymandering

Jessica Pupovac of Illinois Issues covers Illinois efforts to end prison-based gerrymandering.

by Andrew Adams, March 16, 2011

As the Census Bureau was just beginning its count last year, State Rep. LaShawn Ford, a Chicago Democrat, sponsored a bill to correct prison-based gerrymandering in Illinois.

Jessica Pupovac, in a February 2010 article in Illinois Issues, wrote that:

50,000 prisoners throughout Illinois will be counted at [prisons located] in communities where they are unlikely to ever cast a ballot, send a child to school or access social services.

Now, a year later with the census complete, Rep. Ford’s bill is again live in the House.

Pupovac interviews U.S. Census Bureau’s Jim Dinwiddie who explains, “We’ve been doing that the same way since 1790.”

The Census Bureau has always counted prisoners at the location of the prison, but only recently in the era of mass incarceration has this effected legislative districts. For example, Lee County is comprised of four districts, each containing about 9,000 people. But the population of one of Lee’s districts is 25% prisoners. 75 voters in the district containing the prison have the same voting power as 100 voters in the other districts.

Nonetheless, Dinwiddie told Pupovac:

The main thing is that everybody understands this is how we do it, and then they can interpret the data the way they interpret the data. States may want to look at how they do their districting or fund allocation within the state. Maybe they want to exclude populations…. That’s up to them.

So Rep. Ford’s proposed legislation is fine with the Census Bureau. In fact, Pupovac tells us that, “At least seven counties in Illinois – Logan, Christian, LaSalle, Livingston, Crawford, Fulton and Knox – have taken it upon themselves to tweak their population figures so that prison populations simply aren’t included in city and county districting.”

Moreover, Illinois courts have already said that an inmate isn’t a resident of the prison. County of Franklin v. County of Henry, take this obvious point and make it explicit: “a person confined in prison under the judgment and sentence of a court does not thereby change his residence.”

41% of Illinois’ 50,000 inmates are from Chicago’s Cook County, but 90% of these inmates are incarcerated downstate. As Pupovac points out:

In 20 Illinois counties, more than half of the black population reported in the census as local residents are in fact incarcerated people from elsewhere in the state.

And

95 percent of the state and federal prison cells are located in disproportionately white counties.

Rep. Ford points out what many are already thinking:

It erodes minority influence in government. You have to have good representation for all people in government. That’s why it’s there. And if you don’t have everyone represented, then it’s not a good representative government.

Who would oppose such sensible legislation? Pupovac’s article points to State Rep. John Cavaletto, a Republican from downstate Salem whose district includes a prison population of about 3,500 prisoners.

Cavaletto offers two reasons to ignore existing state law and oppose Rep. Ford’s legislation. First, Cavaletto argues that counting incarcerated people in their home communities is “nothing more than a grab for representation.”

The real grab for representation is in Cavaletto’s district. Their votes have more power than their neighbors in other rural districts that don’t contain a prison.

Cavaletto insinuates that should prisoners be counted at home, his district, which already benefits from “extra representation”, will lose out on valuable federal and state funds. As Pupovac writes, “He fears that any changes in population could negatively affect the already struggling, rural communities he represents.” The bill, however, does not apply to federal or state funding.

Ford, the Chicago Rep. who sponsored the legislation, said:

Contrary to popular perception, most inmates serve short sentences, and [when they return home], many of them struggle to find the resources they need to avoid going back to prison.

So why does Cavaletto think that his struggling, rural white constituents deserve representation on the back of Ford’s struggling, urban, and largely black constituents?

“Members of communities I represent put themselves in harm’s way every day guarding Illinois’ most dangerous criminals,” says Cavaletto.

It’s clear to me that while Cavaletto is fighting to have these “dangerous criminals” bussed to his district, he only wants prisoners for their sheer numbers, not as constituents. As Pam Karlan wrote, because electoral districts are based on population, people in prison serve as essentially inert ballast in the redistricting process.

Prison-based gerrymandering is a problem for all Illinoisans, especially for those in counties near prisons

Illinois should pass its bill, HB 94, to end prison-based gerrymandering and join other states giving everyone an equal vote regardless of where they live.

by Josina Morita, March 15, 2011

The Census Bureau released the data for Illinois last month, and redistricting for the state and many county governments is underway. Unfortunately, the data has a systematic flaw: the census counts incarcerated people as residents of the prison address, not as residents of their legal home addresses. Our state legislature and county governments must choose between correcting the census or diluting the votes of their own constituents. The practice of miscounting incarcerated persons as “residents” of a prison—which Illinois courts are clear is not a legal residence for redistricting—when drawing legislative districts in order to give extra influence to the districts that contain the prisons is called prison-based gerrymandering. It’s a problem that has until recently gone unnoticed, but can be easily addressed by excluding prisoners from census counts – a perfectly legal solution that many states and local governments have started to do. Illinois should pass HB 94 and join other states that have passed bills to end prison-based gerrymandering and ensure fair representation for all of its residents. In the past year, Maryland, Delaware, and New York have all passed bills outlawing prison-based gerrymandering; similar bills are under consideration in Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, and Oregon as well. Illinois should be the next to outlaw prison-based gerrymandering. House Bill 94 is under consideration in Springfield right now.

Should 49 people have the same voting power as 2,407? That’s the question that advocates of ending prison-based gerrymandering are asking.

Rural Illinois may provide the most striking example yet of prison-based gerrymandering in the entire nation. Lawrence County, Illinois looks likes it’s on the upswing with a 9% population growth rate, three times higher than the growth rate for the entire state. And it looks like it’s becoming a more attractive place to live for African-Americans with a 1,243% increase in African-Americans since 2000. But look a little closer. The Lawrence Correctional Center opened after the last census, holding 2,358 prisoners, over 1,400 of which were African-American. Those prisoners were counted in Lawrence County in the 2010 census, and will be counted there in the current redistricting process, diluting the voting strength of voters everywhere in the state.

Prison-based gerrymandering will dramatically impact Lawrence County’s redistricting. Those counted in the county, including prisoners, will be divided into 7 board districts of 2,407 people each. The district near the prison will only contain 49 people who can actually vote. The people who live next to Lawrence Correctional Center will have almost fifty times the voting power over the county board as other residents. People who live immediately adjacent to prisons shouldn’t have more influence in local government than those who happen to live in the same community but a little further away from the prison.

Last spring, my organization, the United Congress of Community and Religious Organizations, brought more than 300 people to Springfield to lobby for a bill that would have ended the anti-democratic practice of prison-based gerrymandering. We tried to persuade the state government to put an end to unfair redistricting in 2011 before it even got started. The legislature declined to pass the bill, and unless action is taken soon, democracy will suffer all over Illinois in places just like Lawrence County. Lawrence County isn’t unique, either. Of the 40 state prisons, most are located in rural downstate communities.

When legislators use those prison counts to draw state, county or municipal districts, they – unintentionally or not – give extra influence to the district with the prison at the expense of the residents of other districts throughout the state hat have the required number of people. Illinois law bars prisoners from the polls, but crediting them to the wrong districts results in a systematic shift in political power in Illinois.

The Prison Policy Initiative found that 11 of Illinois’ downstate districts include substantial prison populations, and if redrawn, district boundaries would have to change throughout the state. An even larger impact is seen in 4 rural counties, where the prison populations make up 18-25% of a single district, giving the residents of that district more influence on the county board than their neighbors. Peter Wagner has also remarked on the irony that some of the state legislators who support prison-based gerrymandering represent rural counties and cities that have quietly refused to engage in prison-based gerrymandering. When they draw their own districts, these rural counties and cities reject the idea of basing districts on the Census Bureau’s prison counts. Fundamentally, they protect their residents’ voting rights. Representatives in Springfield must be encouraged to follow the lead of these model counties and cities.

Ending the prison miscount gives communities with prisons a better understanding of what’s happening in their backyards, too. If the prisoners were excluded from the census, it’d be clear that Lawrence County actually lost residents. By looking only at the census numbers, it also looks like Lawrence County gained 1,490 African-American residents – but all of those are prisoners. Excluding prisoners from the census counts and ending prison-based gerrymandering helps all of us figure out what’s really going in our communities.

In 2008, the New York Times chronicled prison-based gerrymandering in the small rural town of Anamosa, Iowa, where residents whose town district contained a state penitentiary had 25 times the voting power in local elections as residents in other districts. The problem in Lawrence County, Illinois could be twice as dramatic as that in Iowa. Should the people who live next to Lawrence Correctional Center have nearly 50 times more say in local government than those who live further away from the prison?

The Illinois legislature should pass House Bill 94 to end to the prison miscount. The legislature should do this because it’s fair. It should pass the bill to protect the democratic principle of one person, one vote. They should pass it for those living in Lawrence County, and throughout the state that have the right to equal and fair representation.

Josina Morita is Executive Coordinator of the United Congress of Community and Religious Organizations. Last spring, the United Congress organized more than 300 people to go to Springfield and lobby for legislation that would have ended prison-based gerrymandering in the state. The legislature failed to pass the proposed legislation, but the struggle continues.

Preventing Prison-Based Gerrymandering in Redistricting: What to Watch For

A guide for redistricting advocates, shadow commissions and the media on avoiding prison-based gerrymandering.

by Brenda Wright and Peter Wagner, February 23, 2011

Prison-based gerrymandering is the practice of counting incarcerated persons as “residents” of a prison when drawing legislative districts in order to give extra influence to the districts that contain the prisons. The U.S. Constitution requires that election districts be roughly equal in size, so that everyone is represented equally in the political process. But prison-based gerrymandering distorts our democracy by artificially inflating the population numbers — and thus, the political clout — of districts with prisons, while diluting the political power of all other voters.

That this problem exists at all is largely an accident of two facts: (1) an outdated Census Bureau methodology that counts people in prison as residents of the correctional facilities, not of their legal home addresses; and (2) the skyrocketing rates of incarceration. Hopefully, in the future, the Census Bureau will eliminate the problem by counting incarcerated people as residents of their legal home addresses. Last year, three states — Maryland, Delaware and New York — had the foresight to pass legislation to eliminate prison-based gerrymandering within their borders. These three states now require that districts be based on Census data adjusted to reflect incarcerated people at their home addresses. More than a hundred rural counties and municipalities around the country have historically refused to engage in prison-based gerrymandering; they manually remove prison populations prior to drawing districts for local government. But most states and jurisdictions will still face the problem of prison-based gerrymandering in the upcoming round of redistricting.

When your legislature announces a proposed redistricting plan and invites public comment, you’ll need to act quickly to identify if and exactly how they used prisons to distort democracy in your state, county or city. This guide will tell you what to look for in the data and the state’s proposed plan in order to minimize the harm of prison-based gerrymandering.

(This guide assumes you have a mapping staff or sympathetic technical people on the redistricting body to assist you. Your technical allies can refer to our memo, Using the Census Bureau’s Advanced Group Quarters Table, which explains the timing, value, content and limitations of the Bureau’s prison count data.)

Protecting minority voting strength

Sometimes, a district that seems to have a majority-minority population really doesn’t, because of prison-based gerrymandering. If the minority “population” of the district consists of large number of incarcerated persons – who can’t vote – the district population numbers may be distorted. This creates districts that appear to give minorities the ability to elect the candidate of their choice, but in reality, they cannot. You need to examine any majority-minority district that includes a prison, to ensure that the district really has enough voting-eligible persons of color to create a viable majority with the ability to elect a candidate of choice to office.

Example: In order to settle a Voting Rights Act lawsuit, Somerset County Maryland intended to draw a district where African-Americans could elect a candidate of their choice after the 1990 and 2000 Censuses. But the inclusion of a large prison in the 1st Commission District split the sizable African-American resident voting population between two districts, leaving neither district able to elect a candidate of the African-American community’s choice. While the 1st Commission District appeared to be majority-African-American, in reality the district was not able to function as intended, because many of the purported African-American “residents” of the district were actually behind bars.

Similarly, although to different effect, prison populations sometimes create a false picture of racial and ethnic “diversity” within a district. Pointing out these examples is an effective way to raise the issue of prison-based gerrymandering and can be a powerful fact to raise if, as discussed in the next section, the state has under-populated districts that contain prisons.

Example: District 2B in Western Maryland drawn after the 2000 Census appears to be 15% African-American. But nearly all of that African-American population actually consists of incarcerated residents from other parts of the state who are unable to vote or to interact with the community in any way. The actual population of the district is overwhelmingly white.

Example: In 2002, the New York State Senate deliberately underpopulated districts in the upstate region while overpopulating districts in the downstate region. This problem ran parallel to the fact that the Census Bureau credited downstate residents to upstate census counts, and together served to dilute minority voting rights. For example, one of those upstate districts was the 59th Senate District, drawn to contain 294,256 people instead of the 306,072 that each district should have contained. Using Census data, the state reported that the district contained 6,273 African Americans, but three quarters of this population was incarcerated residents of other parts of the state. The legislature used the prison population to disguise the fact that the district had the smallest African-American population of any senate district in the state and they deliberately underpopulated that district to give it extra influence.

Keeping prison-based gerrymandering from making other malapportionment issues worse

Advocates should examine what percentage of each district is actually incarcerated, and how that interacts with the existing population deviations in the proposed districts. Keep in mind that in the strange world of redistricting, “underpopulated” districts have more political power than “overpopulated” districts, because in underpopulated districts, fewer people get the same opportunity to elect a representative as a larger number of people crowded into an “overpopulated” district. For that reason, a district that nominally falls within the 5% deviation rule applicable to state and local districts, but would fall outside that deviation without the prison population, should raise a red flag, and should be examined carefully to determine if the deviation should be reduced. Apart from that specific situation, any districts having large prisons should be scrutinized to avoid underpopulation of such districts compared to ideal district size, because including prison population magnifies the underpopulation of the district.

Note that the inverse is also a concern, even if we don’t have precise block-level data about the pre-incarceration home residence of people in prison who are currently being counted as “residents” of prisons. For example, you can use the fact that incarcerated people should have been counted at home to argue against extreme overpopulation of urban districts where incarcerated people disproportionately come from.

Limiting the vote enhancement in districts with prisons

Advocates should consider whether, if insufficient time remains to collect the home addresses of incarcerated people for this round of redistricting, the legislature can be persuaded to declare all incarcerated people to live at “unknown addresses” and not include them in the individual districts that contain prisons. (See Interview with Justin Levitt of the Brennan Center for Justice for more on why “unknown addresses” is superior to the Census Bureau’s status quo. )

If the legislature will not consider removing the prison populations from individual districts, advocates should examine ways to limit the magnitude of the vote enhancement to each district that contains a prison. Advocates should determine what percentage of each proposed district is actually incarcerated, and consider whether it is possible to configure the districts so that multiple large prisons are not concentrated in an individual district, thereby lessening the size of the vote enhancement in the prison districts. Similarly, if a single block contains a massive prison, advocates should consider whether the block could be split in two, so that the prison population can be placed in two different districts, thereby lessening the vote enhancement in any one district.

Resources:

• The Public Mapping Project is an open source redistricting package intended for shadow redistricting commissions and advocates. The software is building in support for advocates who wish to use alternative datasets, including Census data adjusted to remove prison populations, in their plans.
• Using the Census Bureau’s Advanced Group Quarters Table
• Data about prison-based gerrymandering, links to the database of historical (2005-2010) correctional statistics, and where, in May, we will post shapefiles with the Census Bureau’s group quarters data table and adjusted redistricting data that removes the prison populations and annotations of the blocks that contain correctional facilities with facility names, types, and more detailed demographic data.

Peter Wagner is Executive Director of the Prison Policy Initiative and Brenda Wright is director of the Democracy Program at Demos.

Actualización 28 de Marzo, 2012: Este articulo ahora está disponible en Español
Update March 28, 2012: This article is now available in Spanish.

Prison-based gerrymandering costs Maine 8th graders local schooling

Giving extra school board representation to a (former) prison town changes the outcome of a controversial vote in Maine.

by Peter Wagner, February 15, 2011

The decision last month by Maine’s Regional School Unit 13 to shift 8th graders in the town of St. George from the local school to a regional one is reinvigorating calls for an end to prison-based gerrymandering.

Next year, when 8th graders in the Maine town of St. George find themselves attending the 8th and 9th grade school in Thomaston instead of the local school, they’ll have prison-based gerrymandering to thank. On January 8, Maine’s Regional School Unit 13 decided by a very narrow vote — over the objections of the representatives from St. George — to move the 8th grade. The supporters of the school closure prevailed only because the representatives from Thomaston were able to cast additional votes because the town used to contain a prison.

As Brenda Wright, Aleks Kajstura and I explained in a letter to the Commissioner of the Maine Department of Education in 2009:

“[T]he Regional School Unit 13 apportionment is a system of weighted votes, where each town is given a number of votes in proportion to its population. However, the apportionment was conducted with Census data that did not reflect the actual population. The Regional School Unit based its apportionment on Census Bureau estimates for 2006 that credited the town of Thomaston with the population of the Maine State Prison that had closed 4 years prior.

As argued in Phantom Constituents in Maine’s Regional School Unit 13: How the Census Bureau’s Outdated Method of Counting Prisoners Harms Democracy, basing the weighted voting system on Census counts of prisoners at the now-closed Maine State Prison in Thomaston gives the actual residents of Thomaston an enhanced say over school board affairs.

By padding Thomaston’s actual resident population with the non-resident prison population, the current weighted voting system gives every group of 10 residents of Thomaston the same power over school district decisions as each group of 11 residents in the other towns.

With the RSU 13 board unwilling to request the Commissioner for permission to reapportion with corrected Census numbers, and the Commissioner refusing to make that determination on her own authority, board member Josiah Wilson has been collecting signatures as part of a petition campaign urging the Commissioner to order an new apportionment.

“The recent board decision to move the 8th graders is detrimental for my town and its school,” said board member Josiah Wilson. “But the fact that the prison counts influenced the outcome is making it easier to get voters all over the RSU 13 to sign the petition.”

Unlike the complicated redistricting process, the weighted voting formula required by Maine law is extremely straight forward. In the past, I helped Josiah Wilson calculate the votes for each town based on newer Census numbers that did not include the prison; and when the Census data for Maine are released, we’ll be able to calculate this within minutes.

The delay on ending prison-based gerrymandering in Maine is unfortunate, and I hope that via either Josiah Wilson’s petition or the pending appointment of a new Commissioner of Education, it ends soon. The prison has been gone for a long time. So too should prison-based gerrymandering.

“A Rural Fairness Differential?” – Podcast Episode #6

Interview with Common Cause Oregon on a creative solution to the problem that some rural districts are unwieldy to represent.

by Peter Wagner, January 20, 2011

Play (17:02, 8.4MB)

Host: Peter Wagner, Executive Director, Prison Policy Initiative

Guest:
Janice Thompson, Executive Director, Common Cause Oregon

January, 2011

Transcript:

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 Janice Thompson, the Executive Director of Common Cause Oregon, here to talk with us about her work on prison-based gerrymandering in Oregon and what she calls the rural fairness differential. Janice, thanks for being here today.

Janice Thompson:

Well, thanks for the opportunity. This is an important topic and good to talk about.

Peter Wagner:

Could you introduce yourself to the people listening and reading in on the internet and tell us about yourself and Common Cause and a little bit about your work there in Oregon.

Janice Thompson:

Sure. Common Cause has a slogan that exemplifies what we do: holding power accountable. I have headed the Common Cause office here in Oregon for a little over a year, but before that had ten years working on democracy reform issues heading up a previous organization. I’m coming to this topic in two ways. One is that I got a chance in 2008, 2009 to do a major review of the wide range of opportunities out there to increase voter participation and involvement in the political process. In that context I came to review the range of issues related to prisoners and voting and learned about your organization and this topic of prison-based gerrymandering. The second angle was also work done by, at the time a state representative and now a state senator, Chip Shields, who has been leading this effort in the Oregon legislature. So those two factors merged together and I have been testifying in support of this legislation that was introduced by Mr. Shields.

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NBCSL calls for end to prison-based gerrymandering

National Black Caucus of State Legislators resolution calls on the Census and states to end prison-based gerrymandering.

by Peter Wagner, January 6, 2011

The National Black Caucus of State Legislators just issued an important resolution calling for an end to prison-based gerrymandering. The resolution, LJE-11-03, passed at the 34th Annual Legislative Conference, calls on the Census Bureau to start counting incarcerated individuals at their addresses of residence, rather than the address of the prison, beginning with the 2020 Census. The National Black Caucus of State Legislators calls upon states to enact legislation modeled after the Delaware, Maryland, and New York laws that ended prison-based gerrymandering in those states. The resolution was sponsored by Maryland State Senator Catherine E. Pugh and Maryland Delegate Joseline Pena-Melnyk, who were also the lead sponsors of Maryland’s No Representation Without Population law that ended prison-based gerrymandering in that state.

The National Black Caucus of State Legislators has published the full text of all 23 conference resolutions on their website, and I’ve included the text of the prison-based gerrymandering resolution below.

Reform of prison-based census counting

WHEREAS, obtaining an accurate count of the population is so vital to representative democracy that the framers of the United States Constitution addressed the issue of the census and apportionment in the opening paragraphs of this governing document;

WHEREAS, the United States Supreme Court requires state and local government to redraw legislative districts each decade on the basis of population, so as to ensure each resident the same access to government;

WHEREAS, the United States Census Bureau (Census Bureau) currently has a policy of counting incarcerated individuals at the address of the correctional institution, rather than their residential address;

WHEREAS, African Americans are incarcerated at a rate six times higher than whites; WHEREAS, the majority of state and federal prisons are built disproportionately in white, rural areas;

WHEREAS, counting incarcerated individuals as residents of the prison community has a particularly negative effect on the ability of African American communities to elect their candidates of choice and receive appropriate and adequate political representation;

The secret beneficiaries of Maryland’s “No Representation Without Population” Act

Hint: It's not just Baltimore.

by Peter Wagner, December 23, 2010

With redistricting on the horizon, there have been a number of stories that discuss Maryland’s “No Representation Without Population” Act, passed last April, which will require that incarcerated people be counted at home for redistricting purposes. A number of the stories I read this week make the subtle but critical error of framing the discussion in terms of what Baltimore will gain from the new law at the expense of Western Maryland and the Eastern Shore.

The reality of the bill’s passage was significantly more diverse than the articles imply:

• The bill’s lead sponsors in both chambers had massive prisons in their districts.
• The bill passed with bi-partisan support.
• The bill passed with urban, rural and suburban support.
• Senators of both parties with large prisons in their districts spoke on the floor about their support for the bill.
• The Delmarva Daily Times on Maryland’s Eastern Shore editorialized in support of the bill multiple times, calling it a “Victory for Fairness.”

True, the people incarcerated in Maryland’s prisons disproportionately come from Baltimore. But given the number of districts in Baltimore, and the fact that Baltimore itself contains a large prison complex, the impact on any individual district or the city in total will be quite small.

The real winners of the new law are every single person who doesn’t live in District 2B next to a prison with almost 7,000 people temporarily incarcerated there. 18% of this district’s population was actually incarcerated residents from other parts of the state. Padding district 2B with the massive prison population meant that every group of 82 people near the prison could exercise the same political power as 100 people in any other district. That’s one of the injustices solved by the new law.

If you don’t live in District 2B, the “No Representation Without Population” Act is a big win for you. (And that’s not even addressing the law’s even more dramatic and positive impact on redistricting in rural counties like Somerset County.)

Cindy Boersma made the same points more succinctly in an April 17, 2010 letter to the Washington Post.

In case you were wondering about prisons and apportionment

Apportionment was not affected by the prison count. The prison count is largely a problem for districting within a state, not between states.

by Aleks Kajstura, December 21, 2010

Today, the Census Bureau announced the first data release of the 2010 Census: the population for every state. Today’s data reveals how many seats in Congress each state will receive. The drawing of those district lines, and lines for state, county and municipal legislatures must wait for the publication of block-level counts in a few months.

Apportionment is in the news because fast growing states will be getting additional seats, and states growing more slowly be will have lost seats.

Our work at the Prison Policy Initiative focuses on the repercussions of the Census Bureau’s practice of counting incarcerated people as residents, not of their legal home addresses, but of the correctional facility. We focus mostly on the impact on rural city and county redistricting and on state legislative redistricting, where a single large prison can have a large effect on how the districts are drawn.

The release of today’s numbers raises the question: Did the transfer of people to federal, private and other correctional facilities across state lines impact apportionment?

Our review of the apportionment numbers, and our research on the flow of correctional populations across states lines says that in 2010, apportionment was not affected by the prison count. While 10 states gained seats in Congress and 8 states lost seats, the margin by which individual seats were gained or lost was smaller than the number of people transferred across state lines. The last seat in Congress went to Minnesota. North Carolina missed getting that seat by about 15,700 people, a margin far larger than the flow of prisoners in and out of those states.

This result is not surprising because most people in prison are incarcerated in their home state, so the Census Bureau’s prison miscount is largely a problem for districting within a state and less so for the distribution of political power between states.

Thanks to Andy Beveridge, Sam Brooke, Amanda Fox, Alex Friedmann, Craig Gilmore, Bob Libal, Carrie Ann Shirota, Sarah Walker, and the Bureau of Prisons for helping us collect the necessary data.

“Dale Ho interview” — Podcast Episode #5

Podcast interview with Dale Ho, Assistant Counsel, NAACP LDF

by Peter Wagner, December 1, 2010

Play (14:47, 7.6MB)

Host: Peter Wagner, Executive Director, Prison Policy Initiative

Guest:
Dale Ho, Assistant Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense Fund

Recorded: June, 2010, Aired: November 2010

Transcript:

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.

Thank you for joining us, Dale. I was hoping you could introduce yourself and tell us about what you do at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and why the LDF is interested in addressing prison-based gerrymandering.

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