Indiana students take action to improve local redistricting

Students in a Honor Scholar seminar at DePauw University are repairing local democracy, and getting academic credit for it to boot.

by Leah Sakala, September 21, 2011

A recent article in The DePauw reports that students in a Honor Scholar seminar at DePauw University are repairing local democracy, and getting credit for it to boot:

Following a class discussion on how prison populations cause an imbalance in community population counts, students investigated whether this was an issue that actually affected nearby communities. […]

As students called counties to gather general county opinions about prisoners affecting population counts, they discovered that many of the counties did not know they needed to redistrict. […]

“We called the state, and they said we didn’t need to,” [Putnam County Commissioner Nancy] Fogle said. “They told us that all that needed to be done was to re-certify since the population had not changed much.”

Census data showed that the populations had actually fluctuated greatly in Putnam County and the lack of redistricting caused citizens to lose their equal vote.

Kauffman’s students presented their findings to the Indiana State Redistricting Commission. The Putnam County Commissioners agreed on the importance of the issue and is currently in the process of re-drawing district lines.

Continue reading →

California coalition urges Gov. Brown to sign bill to end prison-based gerrymandering

Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) coalition of 55 organizations calls on Gov. to sign AB 420 into law.

by Leah Sakala, September 21, 2011

Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) has just released a letter signed by 55 organizations calling on Governor Brown to sign AB 420. This legislation would mandate that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation provide the Citizens Redistricting Commission with incarcerated populations’ original address data. This information would allow the Commission to end prison-based gerrymandering throughout the state by reallocating incarcerated people to their real addresses.

The sign-on letter states:

Because of the disproportionate number of people of color in our state who incarcerated, the impact of AB 420 could be extremely great. By providing the Commission on Redistricting accurate information regarding the place of residence of people in California’s prisons, they will have the information needed to draw district lines that correctly reflect the population in our state. AB 420 is not a bill that should pit urban areas against the rest of California. Rather, it is a bill that recognizes the basic principle of “one person, one vote.” This is a bill that could contribute to providing fair and proportional representation to all Californians.

We also submitted a letter asking Governor Brown to sign AB 420.

We commend the Californians United for a Responsible Budget coalition for taking this stand for the welfare of California’s democracy.

McAlester, Okla. still struggling to avoid prison-based gerrymandering

Unintended consequence: an Oklahoma city's new charter may require prison-based gerrymandering. Or does it?

by Peter Wagner, September 19, 2011

Even though the citizens of McAlester appear to unanimously agree that prison-based gerrymandering is a bad idea, the city is still struggling with the problem. We blogged about McAlester back in April.

Ten years ago, the city excluded the prison population when drawing the city council wards. More than 100 other counties and municipalities with large prisons did the same thing. It’s a common practice in line with common sense. Had the city included the prison population, the population of one district would have been 60% incarcerated. The 1,333 actual residents in that district would have received the same representation as 3,333 people in other parts of the city. In other words, the people who lived farther away from the prison would have had less than half the influence of residents who lived near the prison.

So, if the city solved the problem ten years ago what’s the problem now? Over the last decade, the city rewrote their charter and used language that prohibited the kind of adjustment they used last time. The new language says that districts “shall be equal in population … according to the most recent census” (Emphasis added, Sec 6.04(d)).

But it is clear that the drafters of the new city charter never intended to require the city to engage in prison-based gerrymandering:

Dorothy Crone, who had been a member of the commission that created the new City Charter, said it had not been the members’ intent to have the prison inmate population included when redrawing the ward boundaries.

“I served on the City Charter (Commission) when we made those changes,” she said.

“I think we made a little mistake that needs to be corrected.”

Some city residents have discussed changing the charter, but that discussion may have been short circuited by three apparent misunderstandings:

First, according to an article from April, there was a concern that such a change would affect the city’s federal funding. This is an unwarranted concern. Federal funding is distributed by a series of complex formulas that do not use municipal redistricting data.

Second, discussions about amending the charter in order to clarify the unintended language seem to be based on the assumption that it’s a lengthy process that cannot be completed before redistricting is finished. We are not experts on Oklahoma law, but the plain language of the city’s charter seems to describe a simple procedure that could take effect immediately:

ARTICLE 8. CHANGES TO THE CHARTER

Sec. 8.01. Proposal of Charter Changes.

A proposition to change this Charter may be either in the form of a proposed amendment to a part or parts of the Charter or of a proposed new Charter….

(b) By ordinance of the Council containing the full text of the proposed amendment or new Charter and effective upon adoption….

Third, the Commission appears to be operating under some pessimistic and unfounded assumptions:

[Ward Commission Chairman Evans] McBride said that even if the charter hadn’t required the prison population to be included when redrawing the boundaries, it’s likely that federal and state law would have required it anyway.

Again, we aren’t experts on Oklahoma law, but federal law clearly gives counties and municipalities permission to determine for themselves which populations to include when drawing districts. 10 years ago Greer County excluded the prison population when drawing their County Commission districts, and more Oklahoma counties did so this decade. If there is a state statute that requires municipalities to engage in prison-based gerrymandering, we aren’t aware of it.

Clearly McAlester wants to do the right thing. It would be unfortunate if the city diluted the votes of the majority of its own citizens because of some unintended language in a city charter that can be easily changed.

Prison-based gerrymandering in Arizona could harm Native American political representation

At an Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission public meeting on Thursday, Jim March argued that prison-based gerrymandering would dilute Tribal communities' votes.

by Leah Sakala, September 16, 2011

When I wrote a blog post earlier this week about Arizona‘s redistricting process, I hadn’t yet come across Steve Muratore’s extensive coverage of the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission in his blog The Arizona Eagletarian. After Steve reached out, I quickly added his blog to my feed. I’m glad I did.

The Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission recently decided to leave prison populations in their redistricting data, but keep in mind as they draw their maps the electoral consequences of including a large number of non-voting incarcerated people in any given district. The Commission also promised to exclude prison populations from their analysis of minority voting strength under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

But while the Commission may have identified a plan of action, that there are still other factors to consider. At Thursday’s Redistricting Committee public meeting at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, one of the main agenda items was meeting with Tribal Leaders to receive their input and discuss their redistricting concerns. During the public comments portion of the meeting, Jim March of Black Box Voting argued that prison-based gerrymandering has a detrimental effect on Tribal communities’ political representation. As Steve reported in a blog post this morning:

Public testimony of note on Thursday, other than by tribal representatives, included Tucson Libertarian activist Jim March making the case, this time also to the Native Americans in the audience, regarding the prison population issue. He played a PowerPoint presentation and told the audience that unless the method for addressing prisons is changed, it will materially dilute the voice of voters in Arizona’s Tribal communities. March spelled out his concern that a Pinal County superdistrict — covering the I-10 corridor between Phoenix and Tucson — could become a “wholly owned subsidiary” of the private prison industry.

Granted, the demographic data, primarily the number of prisoners currently incarcerated in federal, state and private prison facilities throughout Arizona taken alone might suggest the problem is not necessarily a big deal. But a realistic scenario, considering several likely very real factors might legitimately support March’s fear.

Florence and Eloy, now roughly halfway between Tucson and Phoenix, already have prisons. Gov. Brewer was very recently in Pinal County to promote another prison development project. Local businesses need local residents (who hold jobs) to spend money. A steady stream of government spending for the employees (to house and guard those prisoners) would provide an environment ripe for parochial interests in such a superdistrict (or more than one) with strong incentive to enact laws to promote higher prison populations and additional facilities.

To me, March’s scenario, in present day Arizona, is realistic and not at all dependent on a “conspiracy theory” type mindset.

Although we often stress the numerical vote dilution caused by prison-based gerrymandering, the impact on policy is dramatic. Giving extra political clout to the prison industry hurts every other policy priority Arizona has.

New documents available from the NY Little v. LATFOR case

Our webpage for the case has just been updated with the most recent round of filed legal documents.

by Leah Sakala, September 15, 2011

I just updated our page on the Little v. LATFOR lawsuit with the newest round of filed documents.

In this case, several New York legislators are suing to overturn New York’s 2010 law that ended prison-based gerrymandering. 15 New York voters entered in the suit as Intervenor-Defendants in order to defend the law. The legal representation team for the Intervenor-Defendants, including attorneys from the Prison Policy Initiative, just filed a new reply.

All the documents for the case, as well as the latest related news updates, can be found on our Little v. LATFOR page.

Prison Policy Initiative celebrates 10 year anniversary: A decade of fighting prison-based gerrymandering

This is the first of a series of posts that tell the story of how PPI grew as an organization and built a national movement to end prison-based gerrymandering.

by Peter Wagner, September 14, 2011

The Prison Policy Initiative was founded 10 years ago today with the goal of turning my academic research on what we now call prison-based gerrymandering into a national discussion of how prison counts impact redistricting. We’ve come a long way! In this and subsequent posts, I wanted to tell the story of how the Prison Policy Initiative grew as an organization and built a national movement to end prison-based gerrymandering.

Ten years ago, I was in law school wrapping up an almost year long independent study project with Professor Jim Gardner that linked felon disenfranchisement to what we now call prison-based gerrymandering. My paper, “Prisoner disenfranchisement and state legislative redistricting in New York State: Electoral appropriation and the return of the 3/5ths clause” had the potential to change how our electoral system works, but it needed an audience.

I, along with UMass PhD candidate Stephen Healy and Smith College student Sarah Kowalski, founded the Prison Policy Initiative ten years ago, building a platform to transition my academic paper into a policy paper. Six months later, I was testifying before the New York State legislature telling them about prison-based gerrymandering and urging them to start the redistricting process over with better data that met the state’s constitutional definition of residence. The legislature ignored me at the time, but nine years later, the legislature took our advice.

Over the course of 7 months, we turned my academic paper into what the Prison Policy Initiative eventually released as Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout. The biggest challenge we faced was learning how to explain the connections between the Census, redistricting, disenfranchisement and vote dilution in an accessible way. In an encounter that would change our strategy forever, we got a huge boost from a trained communicator in the media.

While Stephen, Sarah and I were working on the report, the Sentencing Project’s Marc Mauer introduced me to Jonathan Tilove, then a correspondent for Newhouse News Service covering race and immigration, who was doing a feature-length piece about how Census counts affect districting. I shared my academic paper with Jonathan and spent hours discussing it with him. He wrote an article that’s still timely today: “Minority Prison Inmates Skew Local Populations as States Redistrict,” which linked the impact of what we now call prison-based gerrymandering on state level redistricting to the impact on county and municipal redistricting.

Prior to Jonathan’s article, explaining my research used to take hours. His piece helped us succinctly explain who benefits from prison-based gerrymandering. For example, in a single clear sentence Jonathan powerfully summarized one concept that used to take me 15 minutes to explain. Many of the innovations in Jonathan’s article informed how we constructed our “Importing Constituents” report, and its discussion of intra-rural impacts inspired our strategy for the next decade.

Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission wrangles with prison-based gerrymandering

Arizona's Redistricting Commission has announced that it will be cognizant of prison-based gerrymandering during the redistricting process, and will exclude incarcerated populations for the purposes of evaluating majority-minorty districts.

by Leah Sakala, September 14, 2011

It looks like this time around Arizona is paying attention to the issue of prison-based gerrymandering.

At a meeting this week, the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission recognized that counting incarcerated populations as residents of the districts in which they are confined could have a harmful effect on Arizona democracy. The meeting included technical and legal briefings, as well as compelling testimony from Mohur Sidhwa and Jim March.

After a lengthy discussion about the issue and various solutions, the Redistricting Commission promised to keep in mind the potential distortion caused by counting incarcerated people in the wrong place. Commissioner Richard Stertz explained that in particular the commission

…[doesn’t] want to give any indication of creating a non-voting population in a particular legislative district that would lead those that can vote into a hyper-majority by virtue of having so many prisoners in a particular legislative district.

The Redistricting Commission also clarified that it would exclude prisons from its Voting Rights Act Section 5 analysis in order to avoid creating “artificial majority-minority districts” comprised largely of non-voting incarcerated populations. As the Commission’s redistricting expert Bruce Adelson emphasized,

The election analysis in determining what are effective majority-minority districts where minorities have the opportunity to elect, as we’ve talked about, cannot include felons who are incarcerated because they can’t vote.

Prison-based gerrymandering was originally not on the Commission’s agenda. But the Commission’s recent announcement followed a new round of public attention to the problem. In particular, Amanda Crawford wrote a great article raising the issue in Phoenix Magazine, and as I blogged last month, AZBlueMeanie has been writing about the problem on Blog for Arizona. There has also been repeated detailed testimony at Commission meetings from Jim March of BlackBoxVoting and others arguing that avoiding prison-based gerrymandering is both advisable and technically feasible.

Video footage of the September 8, 2011 hearing is available on the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission’s website.

Detailed demographics of correctional populations now available for nation

Database prepared by PPI for redistricting professionals provides detailed demographics for the correctional population, including race, age and gender.

September 13, 2011

September 13, 2011 — A new database prepared by the Prison Policy Initiative for redistricting professionals provides detailed demographics for the correctional population, including race, age and gender. The database expands on the Census Bureau’s Advance Group Quarters Summary File released in April, which identified the population in each Census block that is incarcerated or in some other kind of group quarters.

Redistricting professionals consider it preferable to use the Census Bureau’s counts of correctional facilities when making adjustments to the redistricting data instead of relying on the correctional system or their own knowledge of where the facilities are located. Because the Census often mixes prison and non-prison populations in the same block, and occasionally does not enumerate prisons at their actual locations, the optimal way to identify correctional populations in the Census data is with actual Census data. Our database makes this easy.

Since the Group Quarters Summary File release in April, the Prison Policy Initiative has been working to make the data easier to use. Shortly after it’s release, we translated it into several more accessible formats, including an ESRI shapefile, a Google map and a table searchable by county or state. Some redistricting professionals have been frustrated that the data doesn’t include the names or types of facilities, or detailed demographic counts. Our new dataset fills these needs.

Since April, we’ve used 2010 vintage correctional system data to label the facilities in more than a third of the census blocks that contain correctional populations. (And more are being labeled each week.) This is particularly useful to redistricting professionals because they may wish to treat different types of correctional facilities differently for redistricting purposes, for example, reallocating state prison populations by not local jail populations.

Now, with the publication of Summary File 1, we’ve been able to pull in more detailed age, gender, race and ethnicity data for these populations for most of the blocks. This database is important because the Census Bureau often mixes prison and non-prison populations within the same block, so knowing the demographics of the block does not necessarily tell you the demographics of the prison population. We drew on different Census Bureau data tables depending on the specific circumstances in each block. For example, if the prison is the entirety of a block, the data was easy to access, and we used a table that reports race/ethnicity for the institutionalized group quarters population where the correctional facilities were the only institutionalized group quarter in the block. For other circumstances, we developed other processes to extract the data, and each data element in our database has a full footnote with the source.

Attica’s lessons and the urgency of ending prison-based gerrymandering

It's time to pay attention to the lessons we learned 40 years ago from the Attica prison rebellion, and recognize the critical differences between where prisoners come from and where they are confined.

by Rose Heyer and Peter Wagner, September 13, 2011

Forty years ago, thousands of people confined at the Attica prison in rural New York State rebelled, taking control of D-yard. The media was invited in to see the conditions and observe negotiations, so the whole world was watching when, forty years ago today, Governor Rockefeller ordered an assault on the prison, turning what was then the largest prison rebellion into the bloodiest. Forty-three people died, almost all from state police gunfire.

The rebellion and the investigation into its causes caused a fundamental reexamination of correctional policy throughout America, but the difficulties the state had in reforming Attica itself offers a powerful lens on the central role of geography and race in criminal justice policy.

Forty years ago, 63% of the people incarcerated at Attica were Black or Latino, but at that time there were no Blacks and only one Latino serving as guards. The prison population was 70% urban, mostly from New York City, but 80% of the guards were from rural New York.

The racial disparity between the keepers and the kept increased tensions at Attica, and gave Black and Latino prisoners a painful daily reminder that justice isn’t colorblind.

Many of the rebellion’s demands were common sense improvements to food, mail policies and rehabilitative programs, and were implemented nationwide in the years that followed. But the critical demand for more Black and Latino staff proved to be the most difficult to implement. The problem was not the hiring practices of the prisons, it was the locations of the prisons themselves. As leading scholar William Nagel explained shortly after the rebellion: “To avoid a federal Attica, the Federal Bureau of Prisons is now feverishly attempting to recruit black staff, but its task is complicated by the remoteness of its facilities.”

While existing prisons themselves are impossible to move, this lesson of Attica about the dangers of staff disparities was lost in the rush of the late 1980s and 1990s to build more prisons. Speculative ideas about rural economic development trumped safe and rehabilitative correctional policy. Two-thirds of new prisons were built in rural areas, despite the experience at Attica and despite research showing that keeping an incarcerated person close to home increases family visits and reduces the odds of recidivism or a return to prison. Thus, despite, a consensus that prisons should hire more Black and Latino staff, progress has been limited.

By 2005, (the latest year with complete comparative data), the incarcerated population at Attica had increased to 77% Black and Latino. But out of a total staff of 859, the number of blacks had only risen to 12 and the Latino staff to 9. Attica’s staff remains overwhelmingly white because Attica itself has not moved. Attica remains located in a rural, overwhelmingly white region of New York State.

Attica’s staffing pattern is dramatic, but nationally, it’s not atypical. The fact that Blacks and Latinos make up 57% of the nation’s incarcerated population but hold only 28% of the correctional jobs is further proof that the bulk of the nation’s prisons are still in communities that are very different than the communities that incarcerated people come from.

In part, these facts show how the prison system’s wild growth undermined its own goals. But from the perspective of voting rights, they tell a larger story about how mass incarceration dilutes the votes of individual Blacks and Latinos who don’t have any direct contact with the criminal justice system.

Prison-based gerrymandering's striking resemblance to the infamous three-fifths clause

The original U.S. Constitution used enslaved people to grant extra political clout to the states with lots of slaves, shifting the balance of power. This dynamic has a contemporary parallel.

by Leah Sakala, September 9, 2011

I was recently watched some striking footage of a Wisconsin Assembly hearing from September, 2009, about Assembly Joint Resolution 63 to exclude incarcerated persons from redistricting data. The video begins with a discussion of how to count incarcerated people in Wisconsin, but then quickly turns into a heated debate about how prison-based gerrymandering relates to our nation’s conflicted history with the concepts of personhood and equal representation. To me, the fact the conversation veered into such fundamental questions shows how sometimes the solutions to prison-based gerrymandering can be counterintuitive.

Here’s why:

When incarcerated people are counted as residents of the district in which they are incarcerated, the actual residents of that district get undue additional political clout and the voters who live everwhere else lose out. The ideal solution is to completely solve the problem by counting incarcerated people at their home addresses. But, although it may sound strange at first, the second best option is for incarcerated populations to be removed from redistricting data altogether. The video I watched was about this second approach. Wisconsin 2009 Assembly Joint Resolution 63 sponsored by Representative Fred Kessler proposed to remove prison counts from Wisconsin’s redistricting data.

But this idea didn’t sit well with Representative Kleefisch. Given the United States racially disproportionate incarceration rates and pernicious history of denying racial minorities their civil rights, he asked, doesn’t the proposal to exclude prisoners from redistricting counts hark back to the infamous practice of denying certain individuals their full personhood?

Representative Kelda Helen Roys responded to this question by drawing an apt historical connection to the infamous 1787 constitutional clause that counted each slave as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of Congressional redistricting, even though they were denied the right to vote. The three-fifths clause had the effect of using slave population numbers to artificially beef up the political power of the Southern, white, property-owning voters who were invested in maintaining and expanding the slave system. But the problem with the three-fifths clause wasn’t that the slaves were counted as only a fraction of a person. After all, since their “political clout” went right into the hands of the very people who exploited them, the political distortion would have been even greater had they been counted as full people. The problem was that slave populations were used to artificially inflate the political power of the very same people who went to great lengths to deny them their right to personal sovereignty, much less their right to vote.

When a government engages in prison-based gerrymandering, incarcerated people, who disproportionately come from minority and urban communities, are stripped of their right to vote but still included in the population counts of the disproportionately white districts in which they are incarcerated. Their political clout is essentially handed through the bars to the real residents of the community that contains the prison, giving certain people more political say simply by virtue of their residential proximity to a large prison. This also gives the legislators who represent districts that include prisons the power to use incarcerated people’s bodies to count against their own interests by supporting punitive criminal justice legislation, as such representatives are utterly free from accountability to their non-voting “constituents” behind bars.

It’s just as unfair as it sounds. And Representative Roys’s observation about the connection between prison-based gerrymandering and the three-fifths clause isn’t abstract history. Let’s look at a contemporary example.