Civil Rights Organizations File Motion to Defend Law Ending Prison-Based Gerrymandering

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

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.”
• 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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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

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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Court Should Reject Lawsuit Seeking to Manipulate Prison Populations in New York Redistricting

Press Release: Court Should Reject Lawsuit - Voting Rights Groups Support Improved Rules for Counting Incarcerated Persons

April 6, 2011

Voting Rights Groups Support Improved Rules for Counting Incarcerated Persons

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Tim Rusch, Demos, 212 389-1307
Peter Wagner, Prison Policy Initiative, (413) 527-0845, (413) 923-8478
Anna Pycior, Demos, (212) 389-1408

April 6, 2011–Demos and the Prison Policy Initiative, two national pro-democracy groups, expressed serious objections today to a lawsuit filed in state court that seeks to reinstate the discredited policy of miscounting incarcerated New Yorkers when state and local legislative districts are redrawn this year.

Landmark legislation, signed into law by Governor Paterson last August, corrected a long-standing miscount of incarcerated populations and directed that these individuals be counted as residents of their home communities for redistricting purposes.

The prior practice of padding legislative districts with prison populations artificially enhanced the weight of a vote cast in those districts at the expense of all districts that did not contain a prison. The lead plaintiff, Senator Betty Little, has 13 prisons in her district.

“Senator Betty Little filed suit this week to revive a legal fiction, claiming that individuals imprisoned in her district are members of the local community and should be counted there when it comes to drawing state and local legislative districts. Senator Little’s attempt to inflate the population of her district with more than 10,000 incarcerated, non-voting residents from other parts of the state will dilute the votes cast in all other districts.” said Peter Wagner, Executive Director of the Prison Policy Initiative.

“The senator’s action also flies in the face of local practice. For many years, all of the counties represented by Senator Little, and most of the counties represented by her co-plaintiffs, have removed the prison population when drawing local legislative districts. This lawsuit threatens to overturn this common sense practice and force local county governments to draw incredibility distorted districts.”

The law being challenged contains provisions to help New York correct past distortions in representation which include:

• Seven of the current New York State Senate districts meet minimum population requirements only by claiming incarcerated people as residents.
• Forty percent of an Oneida County legislative district is incarcerated, and 50 percent of a Rome City Council ward is incarcerated, giving the people who live next to the prisons more influence than people in other districts or wards.

“The arguments in this lawsuit are clearly wrong. Incarcerated persons do not make their ‘home’ in the prison town in any meaningful sense; they are not permitted to interact with the prison town and they almost always return to their pre-incarceration community upon completion of sentence, on average within 34 months,” said Brenda Wright, Director of the Democracy Program at Demos.

“The miscount of incarcerated individuals called for in the lawsuit violates the fundamental one-person, one vote principle of our democracy and contradicts the New York Constitution, which clearly states that a prison is not a residence,” said Wright. “The plaintiffs here are wrong on the facts and wrong on the law. Their suit should be dismissed.”

One of the counties represented by Senator Little, Essex County, passed a local law in 2003 explaining why treating prison populations as “residents” of the county distorts fair representation:

“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 in which … the correctional facilities … are located.

“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….

“The Board of Supervisors finds that the population base to be utilized in and by the plan apportioning the Essex County Board of Supervisors should exclude state and federal inmates.”

The Prison Policy Initiative and Demos are partners in a national project to end prison-based gerrymandering, advocating for the Census Bureau and state and local governments to count incarcerated persons at their home residences. New York, Maryland and Delaware each passed legislation in 2010 to correct the way incarcerated people have been counted.

And while the Census Bureau did not have time to consider counting incarcerated people at home for the 2010 Census, in the next few weeks the Census Bureau will be publishing an Advance Group Quarters Table. The data will allow states and local governments to more readily identify prison populations in the redistricting data, and choose to either remove the prison populations or combine those counts with their own data to count incarcerated people at home.

Coalition Praises Lawmakers for Ending Prison Gerrymandering

New York's Coalition to End Prison-Based Gerrymandering praises lawmakers for ending prison-based gerrymandering in New York.

August 4, 2010

Coalition Praises Lawmakers for Ending Prison Gerrymandering:
Budget Action Will Bring Greater Fairness to Drawing Lines for Legislative Districts

Albany, NY — The Coalition to End Prison-Based Gerrymandering, a coalition of over 70 statewide policy, advocacy, civil rights, good government and community organizations, thanked lawmakers today for passing legislation to end the unjust and undemocratic practice of prison-based gerrymandering. If signed into law by Governor Paterson, New York will join Maryland, Delaware and 13 upstate New York counties, including Wyoming, Washington, Sullivan, Cayuga, Chemung, Clinton, and Franklin, that have already ended prison-based gerrymandering and adopted a fairer method of apportioning political power.

“For decades incarcerated individuals have been used by state politicians as pawns, giving more representation to some communities and less to others,” said Karen Scharff, Executive Director of Citizen Action of New York, the convener of the Coalition to End Prison-based Gerrymandering. “The Senate and Assembly took courageous action today that will mean fairer representation for every New Yorker. Now it is up to Governor Paterson to sign the bill into law and end the undemocratic, unconstitutional and racist practice of prison-based gerrymandering.”

Prison-based gerrymandering is an antiquated practice by which state legislative district lines are drawn based on Census population counts that include people in prison as residents of their place of incarceration, instead of their home communities. This practice drastically inflates the political representation of some communities, and dilutes the representation of all other communities. Today, the legislature, as part of the revenue bill, fixed the broken system by requiring people in prison to be counted in their home communities for the purposes of redrawing district lines. The original legislation to end prison-based gerrymandering was sponsored by Senator Eric Schneiderman and Assembly Member Hakeem Jeffries. The legislation will not affect the distribution of federal funding.

New York to correct miscount of incarcerated people

New law caps decade-long effort to improve fairness and accuracy of data used for state and local redistricting.

August 3, 2010

New law caps decade-long effort to improve fairness and accuracy of data used for state and local redistricting

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Peter Wagner, Prison Policy Initiative, (413) 527-0845, (413) 923-8478
Tim Rusch, Demos, 212 389-1407
Brenda Wright, Demos, 617 913-1967

August 3, 2010 – Today, the New York State Senate passed legislation ensuring that incarcerated persons will be counted as residents of their home communities when state and local legislative districts are redrawn in New York next year. The measure, already passed by the Assembly, was included in the budget package that now awaits Governor Paterson’s signature.

The state legislature and some counties and municipalities have previously counted incarcerated people as residents of the prison location, inflating the local population counts used for legislative districts. Padding legislative districts with prison populations artificially enhances the weight of a vote cast in those districts at the expense of all districts that do not contain a prison.

The bill now on Governor Paterson’s desk would use data from the department of corrections to identify the home addresses of incarcerated persons and include them in the population counts for those areas prior to redistricting. Because the bill does not change the core Census data, no federal funding based on Census data would be affected. The bill will affect state senate, state assembly, county and municipal districting in the state that will begin in 2011.

Delaware Passes Law to Count Incarcerated Persons at their Home Addresses for Redistricting

Becomes Second State To Adopt Reform Ensuring Fairness and Accuracy of Redistricting

July 7, 2010

Becomes Second State To Adopt Reform Ensuring Fairness and Accuracy of Redistricting

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Peter Wagner, PPI, (413) 527-0845
Tim Rusch, Demos, 212 389-1407
Brenda Wright, Demos, 617 232 5885 ext. 13

On June 30, the Delaware Senate passed a bill ensuring that incarcerated persons will be counted as residents of their home addresses when new state and local legislative districts are drawn in Delaware. The bill previously passed in the House, and is now awaiting Governor Jack Markell’s signature.

The U.S. Census currently counts incarcerated people as residents of the prison location. When states use Census counts to draw legislative districts, they unintentionally enhance the weight of a vote cast in districts that contain prisons at the expense of all other districts in the state. Delaware is the second state to correct this problem and adjust Census data to count incarcerated persons at their home address, joining Maryland which enacted a bill in April. Similar legislation is pending in New York.

“Delaware’s legislation recognizes that prison-based gerrymandering is a problem of fairness in redistricting. All districts — some far more than others — send people to prison, but only some districts have large prisons. Counting incarcerated people as residents of the prison distorts the principle of one person, one vote, and we applaud the Delaware General Assembly for enacting this common-sense solution,” said Peter Wagner, Executive Director of the Prison Policy Initiative.

Claiming prisoners as Cranston constituents has a downside for Rhode Island city’s voting rights

The residents of Cranston who don't live next to the state's prison complex have their votes diluted in the city council, charges a new report.

April 13, 2010

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Bruce Reilly, DARE (401) 286-1507
Peter Wagner, PPI (413) 527-0845

Today, Maryland became the first state in the nation to pass a bill adjusting their census data to count prisoners at their home addresses. Bills are also pending, or in process, in seven states other than Rhode Island, where nearly 4,000 people are currently at the state prison in Cranston.

The residents of Cranston who don’t live next to the state’s prison complex have their votes diluted in the city council, charges a new report by Prison Policy Initiative.

Maryland enacts law to count incarcerated people at their home addresses

First-in-nation law will improve fairness and accuracy of the Census data used for redistricting.

April 13, 2010

First-in-nation law will improve fairness and accuracy of the Census data used for redistricting

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Peter Wagner, PPI, (413) 527-0845
Tim Rusch, Demos, 212 389-1407
Brenda Wright, Demos, 617 232 5885 ext. 13

April 13, 2010 – Today, Governor Martin O’Malley signed into law a bill ensuring that incarcerated persons will be counted as residents of their home addresses when new state and local legislative districts are drawn in Maryland.

The U.S. Census counts incarcerated people as residents of the prison location. When state and local government bodies use Census counts to draw legislative districts, they unintentionally enhance the weight of a vote cast in districts that contain prisons at the expense of all other districts in the state. Maryland is the first state to pledge to collect the home addresses of incarcerated people and correct the data state-wide.

The new law will help Maryland correct past distortions in representation caused by counting incarcerated persons as residents of prisons, such as the following:

• 18% of the population currently credited to House of Delegates District 2B (near Hagerstown) is actually incarcerated people from other parts of the state. In effect, by using uncorrected Census data to draw legislative districts, the legislature granted every group of 82 residents in this districts as much political influence as 100 residents of every other district.
• In Somerset County, a large prison is 64% of the 1st County Commission District, giving each resident in that district 2.7 times as much influence as residents in other districts. Even more troubling is that by including the prison population as “residents” in county districts, the county has been unable to draw an effective majority-African American district and has had no African-American elected to county government, despite settlement of a vote dilution lawsuit in the 1980s.

The problem is national as well. One legislative district in New York includes 7% prisoners; a legislative district in Texas includes 12% prisoners; and 15% of one Montana district are prisoners imported from other parts of the state. Indeed, the 2010 Census will find five times as many people in prison as it did just three decades ago. To address this problem, eight other states have similar bills pending in the current session or being prepared for reintroduction in the next legislative session: Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin.

“The Maryland legislature has taken a much-needed step to ensure fairness in redistricting and reflect incarcerated populations in a more accurate way. Maryland’s action should pave the way for other states to end the distortions caused by counting incarcerated persons in the wrong place,” said Peter Wagner, Executive Director of the Prison Policy Initiative.

“Maryland’s ‘No Representation without Population’ Act will bring the state’s redistricting practices in line with the rules Maryland uses for determining legal residence of incarcerated persons for other purposes. We applaud this common-sense solution to a growing problem of fairness in representation,” said Brenda Wright, Director of the Democracy Program at Demos.

The legislation, passed as H.B. 496 and S.B.400, applies only to redistricting and would not affect federal funding distributions.

The Prison Policy Initiative and Demos have a national project to end prison-based gerrymandering, seeking to change how the U.S. Census counts incarcerated people and how states and local governments use prison counts when drawing districts. The two groups provided technical assistance to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Maryland and the Legislative Black Caucus of Maryland who led this effort.

In addition, Mr. Wagner and Ms. Wright both testified in support of Maryland’s new law at legislative hearings this spring. Their testimony pointed out that HB496/SB400 has precedent in the practice of more than 100 rural counties around the country that currently revise the Census Bureau’s prison counts for internal districting purposes, and in the laws of states such as Kansas that adjust the Census for other purposes.

PPI and Demos long have advocated for the Census Bureau to change its practices so that incarcerated persons would be counted at their home residences on a nationwide basis. While it is too late for that change to be made for the 2010 Census, the Census Bureau’s recent decision to accelerate the release of its prison count data so that states can more readily identify prison populations in the Census will be helpful to states such as Maryland that wish to make their own adjustments.

PPI and Demos applaud the lead sponsors of the legislation, Delegate Joseline Pena-Melnyk and Senator Catherine Pugh, who deserve special credit for their leadership on this issue. Although both represent legislative districts that contain large prison populations currently counted as part of their districts, both recognized that the issue of fairness and accuracy in statewide redistricting should take precedence over individual concerns. PPI and Demos are also encouraged by the bi-partisan support for the bill including that of Republican Senators J. Lowell Stoltzfus and Donald F. Munson.

Representatives Lawlor and Holder-Winfield announce legislation to end prison-based gerrymandering

Press release for report and event at Yale Law School.

March 31, 2010

National advocates release report showing 7 Connecticut legislative districts are missing 5% of their required population, distorting democracy

New Haven, Conn., March 25, 2010 – Today, State Representatives Mike Lawlor and Gary Holder-Winfield joined Miles Rapoport, former Connecticut secretary of state and president of Demos, and Peter Wagner, executive director of the Prison Policy Initiative to announce new legislation that would end Connecticut’s practice of counting prisoners as resident of their cellblocks instead of their neighborhood blocks when drawing legislative districts.

The federal Census counts incarcerated people as if they resided where the prison is located, and that creates big problems for democracy in Connecticut, charges a new report announced today by the non-profit Prison Policy Initiative. American democracy relies on Census counts to apportion political power on the basis of equal population. By Connecticut law, prisoners can’t vote and remain residents of their home communities. Yet, for drawing legislative districts Connecticut miscounts prisoners as residents of prisons and distorts the constitutional principal of “one person, one vote.”

Census Bureau counts Minnesota’s incarcerated population in the wrong place; access to democracy distorted

New report identifies harm of prison-based gerrymandering in Minnesota.

March 9, 2010

The federal Census counts incarcerated people as if they resided where the prison is located, and that creates big problems for democracy in Minnesota, charges a new report by the non-profit Prison Policy Initiative.

American democracy relies on Census counts to apportion political power on the basis of equal population. By Minnesota law, prisoners can’t vote and remain residents of their home communities. “By relying on Census Bureau counts of prison populations to pad legislative districts with prisons, Minnesota is inflating the votes of residents who live near prisons at the expense of every other resident,” said report author Aleks Kajstura.

“Every decade we redraw our districts. The state uses Census data to redraw its own districts. Using prisons to pad the populations of a small number of districts dilutes the votes of everyone else,” said State Senator Linda Higgins – DFL-Minneapolis. Senator Higgins and Representative Champion are developing legislation to change the way Minnesota uses census data in redistricting.