Redistricting explained

by Peter Wagner, March 15, 2004

We’ve written two new articles that explain how redistricting works. The first is a theoretical introduction to the topic and the second explains how the transfer of prisoners can change the outcome of elections on the border between different regions of the state.

Redistricting Matters: Small changes in the boundary lines mean huge electoral effects uses some simple illustrations to illustrate why redistricting matters.

Hanging in the balance? is about New York State Senate district 34 which straddles the border of NYC’s Bronx county and Westchester county in such a way as to use Bronx residents to create a Westchester district.

Forty out of forty legislators agree: Prisoners incarcerated in my district are not really my constituents

by Peter Wagner, March 8, 2004

PrisonersoftheCensus.org argues that prisoners are a part of the community where they originated and not the prison-hosting community. Home is where their social, political and cultural ties are. But do legislators look at it the same way?

Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman decided to find out:

“… I sent to all members of the lower house of the Indiana state legislature a brief survey that included the following question:

“Which inmate would you feel was more truly a part of your constituency?

“a) An inmate who is currently incarcerated in a prison located in your district, but has no other ties to your district.

“b) An inmate who is currently incarcerated in a prison in another district, but who lived in your district before being convicted and/or whose family still lives in your district.

“Every single one of the forty respondents who answered the question – regardless of their political party or the presence or absence of a prison in their district – chose answer (b). Had the responses been more ambiguous there might have been reason to repeat the survey with other groups of legislators. However, unless there is something highly anomalous about Indiana, it is quite clear that representatives do not consider inmates to be constituents of the districts in which they are incarcerated – unless, of course, they happen to have prior ties to those districts.”

Since everybody agrees that prisoners should be represented at home, the Census should count prisoners in the same place — at home.

Source: Counting Matters: Prison inmates, population bases, and “one person, one vote”, by Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman 11 Va. J. Soc. Pol’y & L. 229, 303. (Winter 2004)

Upstate New York radio asks: Are state prisoners local residents?

by Peter Wagner, March 8, 2004

David Sommerstein has a great piece on North Country Public Radio Prisoners: North Country Residents?. The piece was aired on March 5, the morning of Peter Wagner’s presentation at the Census Bureau symposium and discusses our Feb 16 Fact of the Week contrasting Franklin County’s exclusion of the prisoner population with St. Lawrence County’s decision to include the prison population to shore up underpopulated Republican districts in the county legislature.

You can listen to the program at the above link, or read a transcript we created.

Changing how prisoners are counted will not require a change in how college students are counted

by Peter Wagner, March 1, 2004

Unlike college students, prisoners are not a part of the local community. While some colleges are partially self-reliant communities, prisons are entirely so. Students are welcome and encouraged to come in to town to purchase goods and services and to rent apartments. Students can register to vote in the local community and may decide to stay permanently after graduation.

Prisoners are barred from leaving the facility without official permission. Forty-eight states bar prisoners from voting, and those that allow prisoners to vote require the voting to be done via absentee ballot back home. Finally, parole regulations frequently require prisoners to be returned to their original county of conviction upon release.

While students are a part of the host community, prisoners are not.

For more information on how students are counted, see our new FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section.

Counting prisoners in prison towns can burden local government

by Peter Wagner, February 23, 2004

In 1999, the tiny village of Grafton Ohio successfully lobbied the Ohio legislature to have state prisoners excluded from its official population totals. Ohio law requires villages to become cities and offer additional services when their population reaches 5,000.

Councilperson John Lescher told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that Grafton didn’t have the budget to be a city, and that situation was by design. “Years ago, we laid out a master plan for the village. It included parks, infrastructure and other upgrades. Nowhere did we desire to become a city.”

Becoming a city would require “hiring a labor attorney, a safety/service director and creating a cemetery board and city health district.” Standards for police and firefighters would also be raised, meaning more expense.

Councilperson Lescher complained that as a result of the Census counting state prisoners as Grafton residents, the village will have “to spend money we don’t have to make changes for people that don’t even benefit from our services.”

Prisoners distort democracy in St. Lawrence County

by Peter Wagner, February 16, 2004

The legislative districts in St. Lawrence County average 7,462 residents in size. District 2 (Ogdensburg) counts 2,074 prisoners in two state prisons as “residents”; District 5 (Gouverneur) includes 1,046 prisoners. None of the prisoners are allowed to vote, and few, if any, are from St. Lawrence County. The votes of 5,639 county residents in District No. 2 have been given the same weight as 7,462 residents in other districts. This is the same as pretending that the votes of 8 people are equal to the votes of 10. Is the principle of “one person one vote” violated when 8 votes are considered equal to 10?

State legislatures are not the only places where democracy is distorted by including prisoner populations in the redistricting data. Counties are also required to redistrict their legislatures (or Boards of Supervisors) after each Census. Although prison hosting communities do not see the prisoners as local residents, the Census chooses to count prisoners as if they were. This creates an interesting problem, as illustrated by adjoining rural counties in upstate New York that treat the prison counting issue in different ways.

St. Lawrence County recently changed policy and counted 3,120 prisoners in their local redistricting plan. The population of one legislative district there is more than one-quarter prisoners. Although the legislative districts average 7,462 county residents, District #2 in Ogdensburg has only 5,639. This gives the residents of District 2 unequal voting power over other county residents.

Franklin, a similar county, neighbors St. Lawrence to the east. Franklin County has always excluded the prison population and has just done so again. This policy avoids what is believed in Franklin County to be an absurd result: A single district (near the Village of Malone) with a population that is two-thirds prisoners. In such a district, actual county residents would have triple the voting power of other county residents.

Prisoners are not allowed to vote. They aren’t allowed to enter the town to participate in it. Their presence is temporary and at the discretion of the Department of Correctional Services. When their sentences expire, or the prison decides to move them, the prisoners will be gone.

As these two counties illustrate, relying on U.S. Census data is not a guaranteed way to establish legislative districts which comply with the one person one vote principle.

Similarities in counting overseas Americans and counting prisoners at home

by Peter Wagner, February 9, 2004

On February 5 2004, the Census Bureau began a test enumeration of Americans in France, Mexico and Kuwait to determine the feasibility of counting all overseas Americans in the 2010 Census. Whether and how to count this population, now estimated at 4.1million, has long been a contentious issue because of the difficulty in locating overseas Americans and in determining whether overseas Americans should be assigned to particular stateside addresses. The debate over overseas Americans offers some guidance on the prisoner-counting question because it shows that the usual residence rule has evolved over time and that questions of necessity, impact, and feasibility shape the rule’s evolution. In sum, a modern Census of a modern America requires a complete count of the nation’s prisoners and it requires that count to be of the prisoners at their home addresses.

Where did the Census Bureau count 44,326 New York City prisoners?

by Peter Wagner, February 2, 2004

Data source: Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York.

Fear of “unwieldy” rural districts in Florida should not have led to dilution of one person one vote principle

by Peter Wagner, January 26, 2004

The entire 7th state representative district [in Florida] … has nine prisons or work camps and 8,443 inmates — better than 5 percent of its total population.

“We worked hard to get these facilities here in our district,” said Bev Kilmer, the Republican who represents the county in the Florida House….

Kilmer thinks it’s fair to count the prisoners as population. Her district already stretches across four complete counties and parts of four more, and without the inmates, she said, it would grow even more ungainly….

The constitution requires political districts to be drawn so that each contains the same number of people. Kilmer is right that under-populated rural districts are geographically large and therefore more difficult for legislators to travel from one end to another to meet constituents. But skewing Census results is not the solution. Providing rural legislators with a travel stipend would be superior to using imported prisoners to dilute the principle of one person one vote.

Quotation source: Jonathan Tilove, Minority Prison Inmates Skew Local Populations as States Redistrict Newhouse News Service, March 12, 2002.

Census count helps postpone drug reform in New York

by Peter Wagner, January 19, 2004

[New York] State Senator Dale Volker, who calls himself “the keeper of the keys” for his control of the process that allocates new prisons, said in an interview that legislators competed to get prisons….

Mr. Volker heads the Senate’s Codes Committee, and Michael Nozzolio, another senator with a prison-heavy upstate district, leads the Crime Committee. Both men have been influential in quashing challenges to the Rockefeller drug laws. While senators and their aides deny that fear of losing prison population affects their support for the mandatory sentences, it is appropriate to wonder whether economics plays an indirect role.

The connection between prisons and local economies crops up in other ways. The government counts inmates as residents of their prison’s town, adding clout to upstate communities and taking it away from cities competing for government services. This is especially important during a redistricting year.

New York’s drug-driven prison expansion, while providing jobs to largely white upstate communities, has devastated black and Hispanic neighborhoods in the cities. Though most drug users are white, 94 percent of the people jailed for drug offenses are black or Hispanic. These inmates, their families and communities suffer when the state chooses long prison terms for these offenders rather than drug treatment. In addition, inmates serve their sentences in prisons far from their families, weakening ties that help prisoners stay clean after their release. New York’s drug policies are costly, ineffective and unfair. It would be tragic if reform was postponed further because these policies benefit a few influential communities.

Editorial, New York Times, Full-Employment Prisons August 23, 2001.