Locking Up the Vote

by Lani Guinier
The American Prospect
March 12, 2001 - March 26, 2001

The disenfranchisement of prisoners takes on new meaning as the nationwide prison population of two million, now about two-thirds black and Latino, is counted by the U.S. Census Bureau and then used to determine how to allocate both federal dollars and legislative seats. Prisoners boost the population of rural communities, bringing in millions more in federal funds that are doled out on the basis of population size. As Cindy Rodriguez has pointed out in The Boston Globe, the Census Bureau counts prison inmates as local residents. This produces the unintended consequence of shifting of federal money out of poor urban neighborhoods into working and middle-class rural ones.

For example, in the small rural town of Coxsackie, New York, the 2,800 prison inmates account for nearly a third of the population, "skewing the town's demographic picture in a way that benefits Coxsackie beyond imagination. And, because the census tabulates the town's per capita income by averaging in the salaries of inmates -- which range from zero to $ 3,000 a year per inmate -- Coxsackie appears poorer, thus qualifying it for federal assistance programs."

It isn't just federal money that follows these citizens out of their communities and into the community in which they are temporarily incarcerated. Political power follows them out. The strategic placement of prisons in predominantly white rural districts often means that these districts gain more political representation based on the disenfranchised people in the prison, while the inner-city communities they come from suffer a proportionate loss of political power and representation. More than 80 percent of New York State prisoners, according to the Globe, are black or Latino, while 64 of the state's 71 prisons are located in white, Republican districts and are used to enhance their political clout. As Rodriguez further notes, prison inmates tend to come from urban areas that are heavily Democratic. They are typically incarcerated in more conservative locales. This process helps create disproportionately Republican state and congressional seats. As David Bositis, senior research associate for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, D.C., told the Globe, "In terms of the redistricting process, it results in a net loss for urban areas and a net gain in rural areas." So as the prison population continues to explode, the process results in a transfer of political power as well.

Ironically, this state of affairs is remarkably consistent with the U.S. Constitution as it was constructed in 1789. Prison inmates can't vote in 48 states, so counting their bodies for political districting and federal funding but not for the franchise is reminiscent of the constitutional "three-fifths clause" that counted enslaved Africans as three-fifths of a person for reapportionment even though they couldn't vote. The infamous Three-Fifths Compromise enabled the South to inflate the numbers of representatives assigned to plantation owners and other southern white male elites in the U.S. House of Representatives. (White women and children, who also could not vote, were counted as whole people, while disenfranchised Native Americans were not counted at all.)