Fear of “unwieldy” rural districts in Florida should not have led to dilution of one person one vote principle

by Peter Wagner, January 26, 2004 Link

The entire 7th state representative district [in Florida] … has nine prisons or work camps and 8,443 inmates — better than 5 percent of its total population.

“We worked hard to get these facilities here in our district,” said Bev Kilmer, the Republican who represents the county in the Florida House….

Kilmer thinks it’s fair to count the prisoners as population. Her district already stretches across four complete counties and parts of four more, and without the inmates, she said, it would grow even more ungainly….

The constitution requires political districts to be drawn so that each contains the same number of people. Kilmer is right that under-populated rural districts are geographically large and therefore more difficult for legislators to travel from one end to another to meet constituents. But skewing Census results is not the solution. Providing rural legislators with a travel stipend would be superior to using imported prisoners to dilute the principle of one person one vote.

Quotation source: Jonathan Tilove, Minority Prison Inmates Skew Local Populations as States Redistrict Newhouse News Service, March 12, 2002.

Census count helps postpone drug reform in New York

by Peter Wagner, January 19, 2004 Link

[New York] State Senator Dale Volker, who calls himself “the keeper of the keys” for his control of the process that allocates new prisons, said in an interview that legislators competed to get prisons….

Mr. Volker heads the Senate’s Codes Committee, and Michael Nozzolio, another senator with a prison-heavy upstate district, leads the Crime Committee. Both men have been influential in quashing challenges to the Rockefeller drug laws. While senators and their aides deny that fear of losing prison population affects their support for the mandatory sentences, it is appropriate to wonder whether economics plays an indirect role.

The connection between prisons and local economies crops up in other ways. The government counts inmates as residents of their prison’s town, adding clout to upstate communities and taking it away from cities competing for government services. This is especially important during a redistricting year.

New York’s drug-driven prison expansion, while providing jobs to largely white upstate communities, has devastated black and Hispanic neighborhoods in the cities. Though most drug users are white, 94 percent of the people jailed for drug offenses are black or Hispanic. These inmates, their families and communities suffer when the state chooses long prison terms for these offenders rather than drug treatment. In addition, inmates serve their sentences in prisons far from their families, weakening ties that help prisoners stay clean after their release. New York’s drug policies are costly, ineffective and unfair. It would be tragic if reform was postponed further because these policies benefit a few influential communities.

Editorial, New York Times, Full-Employment Prisons August 23, 2001.

Prisoner count skews Illinois population

by Peter Wagner, January 12, 2004 Link

Paul Street illustrates how Census counts of prisoners at the prisons rather than at home skew the population of Illinois in important ways:

… The Chicago metropolitan area is home to 83 percent of the state’s African-Americans and point of origin for 70 percent of the state’s prisoners. Nearly two thirds (64 percent) of the state’s 45,629 prisoners in 2001 were African-American, a percentage more than four timers greater than blacks’ share of Illinois’ population. Forty-four percent of the state’s prisoners are African Americans from Chicago’s Cook County. Eighteen of the twenty adult correctional facilities constructed over the last two decades in Illinois are located in counties that are disproportionately white for the state. Just four of the state’s twenty post-1980 prison towns have above-average black populations for the state but in three of those this is only because they get to report prisoners as part of their population.

The Political Consequences of Racist Felon Disenfranchisement by Paul Street in The BlackCommentator.