More Redistricting Follies: Counting Prisoners In Census Data
Forget one-person, one-vote for redistricting. You might not be aware of this, but our system goes so far as to employ one-prisoner, one-vote -- even though prisoners can't vote!
Wisconsin Public Radio reports that a Democratic state Assemblyman from Milwaukee, Fred Kessler, is complaining about the fact that Census data, which is the basis for redistricting, counts prisoners in the areas where they happen to be involuntarily living.
Kessler is now seeking to amend the state constitution so that prisoners wouldn't be counted for the purposes of redistricting, because the status quo gives a disproportionate level of representation to all the other people in prison districts who aren't incarcerated -- that is, the residents who can actually vote -- compared to the voting public in areas that don't have prisons.
From the report by Wisconsin Public Radio: "Oshkosh Republican Rep. Richard Spanbauer's Assembly district includes the Waupun Prison. That means he represents thousands of inmates. He says regardless of what you feel about prisoners, you have to count them."
Well, that's awfully progressive of him.
Josh
Matt
Eric
Brian
I say make the prison its own district. If you want to represent them you have to live there.
July 8, 2009 1:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Snorting coffee out the nose!!
July 8, 2009 1:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Another reason I wish we could recommend individual comments.
July 8, 2009 2:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
So, should we not count residents of a district who are under voting age? How about ex-cons who have done their time and are living and working at the home of their choice but can't vote?
July 8, 2009 1:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Kessler's nightmare district: two prisons and three large universities.
July 8, 2009 1:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Somebody explain to Kessler that the Census counts shitloads of people who can't vote - everybody under 18, for example.
Homeless people with no permanent address. Felons who have served their time but still have no rights, as in Kentucky. Legal aliens who are not yet citizens, as well as migrants without green cards. People in long-term care in hospitals and nursing homes and other institutions.
Not to mention people who never bother to register to vote.
Yes, let the Census count only voting-age adults who have never been arrested, with a physician's certificate of good health and mental soundness and a perfect voting record for the last five elections, including primaries.
Then Congressional representation - and federal funding - will go to those districts with the most "real Americans" who fulfill their civic duty.
Or we could do the obvious, Constitutional and right thing: allow all prisoners to vote.
July 8, 2009 1:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sigh. To be a little fair, there are a few areas of WI that are quite rural, so a prison there might (MIGHT) skew things, proportion-wise, on a very local level. But I can't think of any prisons that are actually located in said areas. Many of them used to be in rural areas, but expansion has changed all that. What was rural is now firmly suburban.
So, basically: Kessler, STFU.
July 8, 2009 2:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
For the record, not every state denies prisoners the right to vote (in Maine and Vermont prisoners retain the right to vote even while they are serving their sentences).
But this really is an issue in some states -- New York being the biggest example, where there are tens of thousands of prisoners being warehoused in large state prisons upstate -- while the bulk of the prisoners are people of colour from New York City. (Thanks to the Rockefeller drug laws.) Counting these prisoners as resident of these upstate areas artificially inflates upstate population and shifts some political power to these Republican-leaning rural communities at the expense of Democratic New York City.)
If these residents were counted where their permanent residence was before incarceration, slight political power would be moved downstate (the upstate prison population from New York City is approximately 55,000 -- about 40% of the population of a State Assembly district, about 20% of a State Senate district and about 8% of a Congressional district).
Ironically, many of the counties (in New York and elsewhere) that are home to large prison facilities remove the prison population from redistricting consideration for local county elections -- because including them would create county districts completely dominated by these non-resident prisoners. These are the same counties that benefit politically and economically from having these same prisoners included in the census count and the Congressional/state redistricting numbers.
In addition to the impact on redistricting , this arrangement also affects the distribution of financial resources.
While the local jurisdiction provides absolutely no services to the prisoner population counted in their numbers (no education, no social services, no transportation, no law enforcement unless there is an escape, no public safety, no health care, etc), these prisoners are often counted in the formulae that are used to distribute federal and state aid. (Remember that once they are released, virtually all of these prisoners will leave the local community and return to their families located elsewhere).
The answer is not to remove prisoners from the calculation for districting (any more than it is to not count other non-voters - young people, non-citizens, apathetic citizens, etc) -- but rather to count these "residents" where they consider their actual permanent residence to be. (This is presently done with college students, who can be counted either in their original home town or in their college residence, depending on what they consider their "permanent residence" to be).
July 8, 2009 2:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not sure about his solution, but Rep Kessler is absolutely right about the problem.
Grenadine: a ton of Wisconsin prisons are in rural areas (Portage, Waupun, Black River Falls, just to name a few off the top of my head). The Supermax prison was built in rural western wisconsin essentially as a jobs program for unemployed rural workers.
And on top of that - a vast number of the persons who get sent TO those prisons are persons of color, especially African-Americans from Milwaukee and other urban centers. Wisconsin has the LARGEST black/white incarceration disparity in the United States. From a recent Governor's report on racial disparities in Wisconsin prisons: "Various national and state reports have documented and quantified Wisconsin's growing disparity between white and minority citizens in the criminal justice system. A report recently issued by the Human Rights Watch and the national Sentencing Project showed that African-Americans received prison sentences for drug crimes 42 times more frequently than whites. And in Wisconsin's prisons, nearly half of inmates are African-American, yet Blacks represent just 6 percent of Wisconsin’s population. "
So - the current system takes black men (mostly) out of the cities, dumps them into prisons in rural areas - and then the cities like Milwaukee show fewer residents in the census, and get less representation, while rural areas get census increases and thus more representation. Which helps feed the advocates for more prisons.
I'm not sure not counting the prisoners at all is the right way to deal with this, but neither is the current system fair. I like terje's idea of counting them where they consider their residence to be. Or better still . . . expand their eligibility to vote.
July 8, 2009 3:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
hmm, Purple. I was thinking about Ethan Allen and the one by LaCrosse, both now in built-up areas. And this really just brings up more questions. Does WI bring in lots of out-of-state prisoners? Is Kessler worried that his state will be over-represented? Has he crunched the numbers for all states, or just his?
And does it matter (for the purposes of redistricting) if the racial make-up of a place changes? Every person counts as one person now, right? We're done with the three-fifths BS, right?
I guess what I'm saying is that Kessler's argument doesn't convince me. I think he just wants attention and that his yelling "BLAH BLAH BLAH the presence of bad (read: black) people will take away your freedom" seems to work.
July 8, 2009 5:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
Grenadine,
You ask "....does it matter (for the purposes of redistricting) if the racial make-up of a place changes? "
What matters for redistricting is the question of where these prisoners are counted, not their racial make-up.
If they are counted in the communities where the prison is located (but they can't vote) they artificially inflate the population count for that community -- giving more political power to these (heavily white, largely rural, more Republican) communities.
The converse is also true, if these prisoners are not counted in the communities they come from (much more likely to be urban, African-American and Democratic) it means that the population totals for these areas are lower -- resulting in less political representation (a.k.a. fewer legislative seats) for those communities.
Given the racial make-up of our prison population, the net result is to weaken political representation for urban minority areas because of the folks missing from their communities and warehoused in geographically isolated prison towns.
In that sense I think you are misunderstanding Kessler's argument -- he isn't arguing not to count these prisoners for reapportionment because they are "bad". He is arguing it to prevent rural prison communities from being over-represented in the legislature due to the presence of the prisoner population which is arguably not really part of that community (and is certainly not part of the electorate).
I think Kessler's solution is wrong (and probably unconstitutional) -- but there is a need to deal with this problem and the built-in advantage in gives to prison communities when it comes time to divvy up the seats in the legislature. Most prisoners' rights groups argue that the solution is to count prisoners as residents of the communities where they lived prior to incarceration (since giving prisoners the right to vote seems politically unlikely in most states).
July 8, 2009 7:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
It seems to me that the anti-Milwaukee bias that does exists among too many legislators (and I'm not being partisan about this) has some racial connotations, and is part of the subtext of how crime and punishment get played out in Wisconsin. That's not the only issue, but it's also not a non-issue.
And yes, a person is a person . .. but the interests of different persons can be very different. And the interests, and needs, of prisoners from urban areas don't necessarily coincide with the interests in rural areas.
If, as terje suggests, persons were counted where they considered their residence to be, we'd almost certainly have an increased representation in Milwaukee, maybe also Racine, and lower in some of the rural communities. And maybe that would provide more balance.
(btw, the list of where the prisons are is on the WISDOC website - http://www.wi-doc.com/index_adult.htm)
July 8, 2009 7:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Prison Policy Initiative has a district-by-district analysis of prison-based gerrymandering in Wisconsin: Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in Wisconsin - http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/wisconsin/
Padding Rep. Spanbauer's district with more than 5,000 prisoners gives his district significantly more clout than its numbers warrant and violates state law which says that a prison is not a residence.
According to a recent PPI blog post - http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/news/2009/06/28/wiamendment/ - about the amendment, "Rep. Kessler has the right idea. Ideally, the Census Bureau would change where it counts people in prison, but the Bureau has squandered too much of the critical planning time to make the change for the next Census in 2010. But if states act soon, sufficient time remains for an interim solution that would end the practice of giving prison districts unearned influence. All these jurisdictions need to do is plan to ignore the prison populations when drawing the district lines."
July 9, 2009 12:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Great comments from everyone on what appears to be a quite complex issue.
July 9, 2009 2:52 PM | Reply | Permalink