Friday, February 12, 2010
Counting Prisoners
They cannot vote, but nearly 72,000 prisoners help tip the balance
of power in the New York State Legislature. This is possible because,
for
purposes of the U.S.
decennial Census, inmates are counted where they are imprisoned and not
in the neighborhoods
where they were living prior to being incarcerated.
“Each decade, state and local governments update their legislative
districts on the basis of population,” notes Peter Wagner, executive
director
of the Prison Policy Initiative, based in Easthampton,
Massachusetts and supported by a
$200,000 grant from the Public Welfare Foundation. “But when they use
Census
data that counts thousands of people in the wrong place, democracy
suffers.”
In fact, according to Prison Policy Initiative, some two
million people are counted in the wrong place. This is another direct
result of
American criminal justice policies that rely heavily on incarceration.
But it
also distorts the democratic process by inflating the population of
rural areas
where prisons tend to be located and diluting the population of urban
districts
where the prisoners came from and where they are likely to return after
serving
their time.
These demographic changes result in real legislative power
shifts in New York, Ohio,
Texas and
other states. In New York,
for example, at least seven State Senate districts are able to meet
minimum
population requirements because of prisoners counted within those
districts.
But since the prisoners cannot vote, the State Senators from those
districts
are not beholden to them as they would likely be to other constituents.
In addition, those legislators — and the sparsely populated
communities
they represent — gain power and influence at the expense of poor, urban
districts that will have to try to meet the needs of former prisoners
once they
return home.
This issue of prison-based gerrymandering is receiving
renewed attention as the latest Census count for 2010 draws near.
Mr. Wagner points out that the issue can have an enormous impact
on local government as well. Anamosa,
Iowa, with a population of about
5,500, is home to the Anamosa State Penitentiary (pictured above), with more than 1,000
inmates.
The prison, called “The White Palace of the West,” because it is made
from
light-colored stone from a nearby quarry and has castle-like features,
is a
physically imposing structure – and more.
The fact that inmates have been counted as part of the
Census and that the prison and a handful of other public buildings take
up a lot
of space in the town’s Ward 2, led to distinctly imbalanced voting
representation for that area.
In an interview with Iowa Public Radio, City Administrator
Patrick Callahan admitted that, in Ward 2, “You only have a small pool
of 140
people who have a vote on the city council. Whereas the rest of the
wards, it’s
over 1,400 people for one vote on the city council. So you do not have
the ‘one
man, one vote’ principle that you normally strive to achieve.”
One beneficiary of the imbalance was Danny Young (pictured at right), a backhoe
operator for Jones
County, which includes Anamosa.
Although he did not intend to run for the City Council in 2005, there
were no
other candidates from Ward 2 and he was elected with two write-in votes –
one
from his wife and one from a neighbor.
Four years later, Mr. Young and others supported the replacement
of Anamosa’s ward system with an at-large system where each of the four
Council
members must earn votes throughout the city. Still, Peter Wagner cites
the old
Anamosa as “one of the most important examples of prison-based
gerrymandering
in the country because it had a district that was almost entirely
prisoners.”
The Census Bureau has recently agreed to create a special
file with prison data counts. It is a possible step toward counting
prisoners
where they lived prior to being incarcerated and should at least allow
state
and local governments to make redistricting decisions on the basis of
better
and more timely information.
As Mr. Wagner puts it, “If we want state legislatures to
respond to the will of the people, we need to ensure that the
legislative districts
are based on where the people reside, not where the state built its
prison
cells.”
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