by Aleks Kajstura, May 15, 2012

Will New Jersey be the next state to end prison-based gerrymandering? Yesterday, S1055, a bill to count incarcerated people at home for redistricting purposes, passed the New Jersey Senate’s Committee on State Government, Wagering, Tourism & Historic Preservation.

Senator Cunningham introduced the bill in January, and the bill was now up for consideration before the Senate committee. There was great turn-out in support of the bill, and I joined several people in presenting testimony: Brother Aula Sumbry (Integrated Justice Alliance of New Jersey), Dr. Johanna Foster (Integrated Justice Alliance), Alex Shalom (ACLU – New Jersey), Nicole Plett (Building One New Jersey), Lawrence Hamm and Jean Ross (People’s Organization for Progress), and Scott Nolen (New Jersey Institute for Social Justice).

When voting to pass the bill, Senator Turner (District 15) noted that she was voting in favor of the bill even though she had large prisons in her district. If New Jersey values fairness and equality as much as Senator Turner does, then the state will soon be the 5th in the country to end prison-based gerrymandering at the state level.

New York and Maryland implemented their laws ending prison-based gerrymandering this past redistricting cycle and California and Delaware’s laws will first apply after the next census. The New Jersey bill will now go onto the full Senate.

by Leah Sakala, May 14, 2012

Today is the last day to cast your vote for Peter Wagner to receive the Maria Leavey Tribute Award for his decade-long work to end prison-based gerrymandering. Campaign for America’s Future presents this award annually to honor an “unsung progressive hero.”

Peter was chosen as a finalist for the award in recognition of his leadership in the movement to abolish prison-based gerrymandering. Our friend and advisory board member Bruce Reilly wrote a great blog post that explains why he voted for Peter and why you should, too.

Thanks for your support, and for sending the message that prison-based gerrymandering must end.

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by Leah Sakala, May 11, 2012

The Tribune Star reports good news for democracy in Terre Haute, Indiana:

Terre Haute is joining hundreds of other communities with big prison populations by voting to remove those prisoners when drawing legislative districts.

At the urging of the city’s legal department, the City Council voted unanimously Thursday evening to exclude the approximately 3,200 federal inmates in the city from being counted when officials draw new city council district boundaries this year. The move will allow each district to have approximately the same number of eligible voters, a redistricting priority.

The City Council’s decision is especially good news given the federal prison’s ballooning population growth over the last decade. Because the prison nearly doubled in size since the last redistricting cycle, the distortion of prison-based gerrymandering would have been particularly dramatic this time around: two people who live in the district that contains the prison could have had as much say in city affairs as three people in any other district.

Moving forward, residents of the city council district with the prison will no longer be granted unwarranted additional political clout at the expense of all other residents.

Way to go, Terre Haute!

by Aleks Kajstura, May 9, 2012

California’s historic law ending prison-based gerrymandering is about to get even better. The California Assembly just passed a bill (AB 1986), that improves California’s law ending prison based gerrymandering, passed as AB 420 last summer.

Last summer, AB 420 (now Section 21003 of the Elections Code) presented a uniform state-wide solution to California’s problem of prison-based gerrymandering, making California the fourth state to end the practice. AB 420 aimed to prepare the State to count incarcerated people at home for redistricting purposes after the 2020 Census, and AB 1986 proposes to make improvements to the law based on New York and Maryland’s implementation of their laws ending prison-based gerrymandering.

AB 1986 extends AB 420 to apply to prison populations in federal prisons. AB 420 only provided for the collection of home addresses of people incarcerated in state prisons.

AB 1986 also increases the precision in the required data. Currently the redistricting data is only requested to be adjusted by zip code, but the new bill expressly references Census blocks, which are the smallest geographic unit used by the Census Bureau. Switching to Census blocks creates more precision while also creating greater compatibility with the Census Bureau’s redistricting data sets.

Lastly, AB 1986 puts greater privacy protections in place. It requests that the Commission not publish the home addresses of incarcerated people, but only the final population data aggregated to Census blocks.

A full bill analysis is available from the Assembly Committee on Elections and Redistricting. AB 1986 is now up for committee assignment in the Senate.

by Leah Sakala, May 8, 2012

Will the Kansas State House districts become one of the biggest examples of prison-based gerrymandering in the nation? The proposed House redistricting plan certainly is, but time is running out and the House and Senate are refusing to approve the other chamber’s plans.

In a recent Kansas City Star column, Mary Sanchez pointed out that, “Kansas has the potential for shenanigans like no other state, thanks to the high concentration of inmates in the Leavenworth area.” She’s right: almost a quarter of proposed House District 40 is incarcerated in Leavenworth-area state, federal and military prisons. The district is somewhat over-populated, but the effect of the prison is massive. If the proposed House districts become law, every 4 voters who live near the prison will have the same influence as 5 voters in other districts.

The impact of prison-based gerrymandering is a little smaller in Kansas Senate districts because they contain more people, but the distortion is still numerically significant due to the concentration of Leavenworth prisons. In the Senate’s proposed plan, nearly 8% of the State Senate District 5 is incarcerated.

But the benefits of ending prison-based gerrymandering in Kansas extend even beyond electoral fairness. A Leavenworth-area paper recently featured the question of how to split Leavenworth County between multiple State Senate districts. The problem is that Leavenworth County is too large, by Census figures, to be a single Senate District, confounding the efforts of those who want to keep the community from being divided.

Here’s the kicker: after removing the population inflation caused by prison-based gerrymandering, the number of actual residents in Leavenworth County is just about right for the county to be its own district.

If Leavenworth County residents want to avoid being divided between two Senate districts in this round of redistricting, they should consider insisting on ending prison-based gerrymandering. Fairness in redistricting often has a lot of positive side effects.

by Leah Sakala, May 7, 2012

A couple of weeks ago I blogged that Terre Haute, Indiana is considering ending prison-based gerrymandering. A recent Tribune Star story reports that this week the City Council may vote on a resolution to remove the prison population from District 1 for redistricting purposes. Stay tuned for more updates!

by Leah Sakala, April 30, 2012

Prison Policy Initiative Executive Director Peter Wagner has been chosen as a finalist for the Maria Leavey Tribute Award for his decade-long work to end prison-based gerrymandering. Campaign for America’s Future presents this award annually to honor an “unsung progressive hero.”

Campaign for America’s Future recently announced the five finalists and opened public voting:

Two Occupy movement volunteers, a Chicago community organizer, an Atlanta health care activist and a crusader against “prison-based gerrymandering” have been nominated for the annual Maria Leavey Tribute Award, which honors an unsung progressive hero. The deserving person you select will receive the award at the June 18-20 “Take Back the American Dream” Conference. The five finalists were announced earlier today on our conference website, and now the voting begins to select a winner.

Peter launched the movement to end prison-based gerrymandering ten years ago with the Prison Policy Initiative’s first report, Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York. He found that an archaic Census Bureau rule enabled legislators with prisons in their districts to claim incarcerated people as “constituents,” bar them from the polls, and then use that extra clout to advocate for more prison expansion.

Over the last decade, Peter worked to expose the problem of prison-based gerrymandering and bring new organizations and leaders in to the movement. The bi-partisan urban and rural movement has won many victories. Four states and hundreds of local governments around the country refuse to dilute the votes of everyone who doesn’t live immediately next to a prison, and the Census Bureau has started to take notice.

Let’s vote for Peter to send the message that prison-based gerrymandering has no place in America’s future!

by Peter Wagner, April 26, 2012

This article is one in a series commemorating the 10 year anniversary of the Prison Policy Initiative and our work.

The Prison Policy Initiative released our first report ten years ago last Sunday.
Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout was the first in-depth district by district analysis of what we now call prison-based gerrymandering. I analyzed each proposed New York State Senate and State Assembly district, looked at where incarcerated people came from, and suggested both interim and long-term solutions.

This report was the first of dozens of analyses we issued over the next decade. This first report was tough going. I hadn’t yet been introduced to Rose Heyer, who developed the electronic research methodology for the project, so all of the analysis was done manually. Every time the legislature changed the proposed plans, I’d have to start over.

After several rounds of this, I recruited some of my fellow law students, Tammy Ciak and Ann Fisher, to help me re-crunch the data tables so the report could be released before the legislature changed the plan yet again. I wanted the report to be relevant and spark a much-needed discussion while redistricting was still underway.

The report received great instantaneous feedback from forward-thinking criminal justice and election reform advocates. This is when I started collaborating with Brenda Wright of the National Voting Rights Institute (later Dēmos) and I was invited to present at the National Summit on the Impact of Incarceration on African-American Families
and Communities. That conference led to our work with Jazz Hayden, Manning Marable and many others.

And the initial media response to our first report? Zero. Given our reputation for bringing media attention to the issue, this might be surprising. But we couldn’t get a single paper to touch our report for months. The problem we identified was too big. The reporters I spoke with loved the issue, but their editors wouldn’t approve a story.

Typically, redistricting stories are simple ones about the partisan horse race of winners and losers. Even the stories that address the systemic flaws tend to focus on who controls the process, not on biases in the data. The first story about the report and prison-based gerrymandering didn’t see print until the NAACP’s bimonthly The New Crisis put it on the cover months later.

With this first report out, the national discussion had begun.

by Peter Wagner, April 26, 2012

I’ll be speaking about prison-based gerrymandering and then moderating a roundtable discussion with Students Against Mass Incarceration on Saturday at the A New Vision of Black Freedom: The Manning Marable Memorial Conference at Columbia University in New York City. My session starts at 10am in the Earl Hall Auditorium.

This conference is particularly important to me because of the role that Manning Marable played in starting the movement against prison-based gerrymandering. As I wrote when he passed away:

Manning Marable helped put what we now call prison-based gerrymandering on the map by inviting me to meetings at his Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University in 2002 and to speak at the main plenary panel at the Africana Studies Against Criminal Injustice Conference in 2003. His early endorsement made our later successes possible.

If you will be in NYC this weekend, I hope to see you at the conference and at my talk!

by Leah Sakala, April 18, 2012

The days of prison-based gerrymandering may soon be over for the city of Terre Haute, Indiana.

The Census Bureau counts incarcerated people in the facilities in which they are confined, rather than at their home addresses. This means that all the people who are locked up in the federal prison within Terre Haute city limits are included in the city’s total Census population counts. Using these census counts for redistricting purposes leads to serious problems for local democracy, unless the data is adjusted to make sure that incarcerated populations — who are not legal residents of the city under Indiana law, and who can neither vote nor participate in the local community — are not used to unfairly pad the district that contains the federal prison.

Because city officials did not adjust the 2000 census data when they redrew the city council districts ten years ago, about 20% of District One was made up of incarcerated people. This means that every four people in District One were given as much say in city government as five people in any other district.

Fortunately, this time around the issue is on the agenda, and city councilors will soon vote on a resolution to exclude the prison population for redistricting purposes.

As the city attorney, Chou-il Lee, pointed out in recent news coverage of city redistricting, using unadjusted redistricting data would mean that the people living in District One would have unfair additional political clout, “because there’s fewer of them represented by a full vote on the council.”

Terre Haute’s recent discussions about ending prison-based gerrymandering are especially good news considering the fact that the prison population has nearly doubled in size over the last decade, meaning that including the incarcerated people in the total counts used for redistricting would have an even more dramatic impact on local democracy than it did after 2000. If local officials do not take action to remove the prison population from the redistricting data, about a third of District One will be incarcerated.

And would it be fair for two voters in District One to have the same amount of say in local government as three voters in any other district? Of course not.

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