\nWith planning for the 2010 census already under way, a question is in play
\nthat will affect future elections: where to count the nation’s exploding
\nprison population?\n<\/p>\n
\nSince the first census in 1790, prisoners have been counted where they’re
\nlocked up, not where they previously lived. But now that there are close to
\n1.5 million prisoners nationwide, the traditional counting method takes
\nvoting power away from liberal urban areas like New York City, where most
\nprisoners come from, and gives it to conservative rural communities, where
\nmost prisons are.\n<\/p>\n
It’s time the U.S. Census Bureau gave states the data they need to reverse
\nthis dynamic.\n<\/p>\n
Prisoners are barred from voting in New York and 47 other states. But they
\ncount for purposes of drawing lines for legislative districts. Locating the
\nprisoners in their upstate cells for districting takes their lack of
\nrepresentation a step further, by reducing the political power of the
\ncommunities from which they come.\n<\/p>\n
Take the New York State Senate. In all, 76 percent of the state’s nearly
\n71,500 prisoners come from New York City and its suburbs. But more than 90
\npercent of the inmates are held and counted upstate.\n<\/p>\n
In that region are seven New York Senate districts with smaller-than-average
\npopulations, thanks to gerrymandering. Each of the seven districts has a
\nRepublican senator. And each has thousands of prisoners – including almost
\n9,000 in the district that includes Attica state prison.\n<\/p>\n
In theory, the Attica prisoners are represented by Sen. Dale Volker
\n(R-Depew). Yet the former police officer says that he ignores letters from
\ninmates in order to spend his time on the corrections workers he sees as his
\nreal constituents. As co-chair of the committee that is reexamining the
\nRockefeller drug laws, Volker has led the opposition to reducing sentences
\nfor the majority of offenders, stonewalling this year’s reform effort.\n<\/p>\n
Taking the prisoners out of the upstate population count would reduce the
\nnumber of legislators like Volker with an incentive to court the corrections
\nlobby.<\/p>\n
\nGerrymandering is an art in New York and many other states. But if rural
\ndistricts didn’t have prisoners to inflate their population numbers, some
\nlegislative lines would likely have to be redrawn, since the seven
\nundersized upstate districts already barely include enough voters to squeak
\nby the constitutional rule of thumb for apportionment. New lines could shift
\none Senate seat from upstate to the New York City area – a move the
\nlegislature sidestepped during the last round of redistricting two years
\nago.\n<\/p>\n
The same questions about fair allocation of political power apply throughout
\nthe country. Many states send tens of thousands of inmates from their urban
\nhomes to rural prisons. With federal prisons expanding twice as fast as
\nstate prisons and unevenly distributed throughout the country, it’s
\nincreasingly possible that the current method of counting prisoners could
\naffect how congressional seats are apportioned among the states in 2010.\n<\/p>\n
The traditional method for counting prisoners isn’t the only reason that
\nurban communities are underrepresented in government: Low voter turnout, the
\nundercounting of racial minorities and felon disenfranchisement are also to
\nblame. But the prisoner count is especially unsavory because it’s
\nreminiscent of the practice of counting slaves as three-fifths of a person
\nthat predates the Civil War. The three-fifths count helped keep black people
\nenslaved by increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegations.
\nToday, half of the nation’s prisoners who are ill-served by the current
\ncensus practice are African-American.\n<\/p>\n
The Census Bureau’s general rule is to count people where they live and
\nsleep most of the time. By adding one line – asking prisoners for their last
\nprevious address – the bureau could also present numbers about the
\nneighborhoods they came from. That’s where the parole department expects the
\nprisoners to go on release. And it’s also where most state constitutions,
\nincluding New York’s, say that a prisoner’s legal residence is.\n<\/p>\n
The bureau can’t provide the new data in time to affect the elections this
\nNovember. But as the prison population continues to grow, changing the
\ncensus will matter even more to the outcome of future races.\n<\/p>\n
Copyright (c) 2004, Newsday, Inc.\n<\/p>\n
Emily Bazelon is a senior editor at Legal Affairs magazine. Peter Wagner is
\nassistant director of the Prison Policy Initiative. They are Soros Justice
\nFellows.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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