NYT: Why Some Politicians Need Their Prisons to Stay Full

by Peter Wagner, December 27, 2004 Link

By Brent Staples
New York Times
December 27, 2004

The mandatory sentencing fad that swept the United States beginning in the 1970’s has had dramatic consequences — most of them bad. The prison population was driven up tenfold, creating a large and growing felon class — now 13 million strong — that remains locked out of the mainstream and prone to recidivism. Trailing behind the legions of felons are children who grow up visiting their parents behind bars and thinking prison life is perfectly normal. Meanwhile, the cost of building and running prisons has pushed many states close to bankruptcy — and forced them to choose between building jails and schools.

Seldom has a public policy done so much damage so quickly. But changes in the draconian sentencing laws have come very slowly. That is partly because the public thinks keeping a large chunk of the population behind bars is responsible for the reduced crime rates of recent years. Studies cast doubt on that theory, since they show drops in crime almost everywhere — even in states that did not embrace mandatory minimum sentences or mass imprisonment. In addition, these damaging policies have done nothing to curb the drug trade.

Changing prison policy, however, is no longer a simple matter. The business of building and running the jailhouse has become a mammoth industry with powerful constituencies that favor the status quo. Prison-based money and political power have distorted the legislative landscape in ways that will be difficult to undo.

These problems are on vivid display in New York, which started mass imprisonment when Gov. Nelson Rockefeller persuaded the Legislature to pass the toughest drug laws in the nation at the start of an ill-starred ‘’war on drugs'’ 30 years ago. The Rockefeller laws introduced the country to mandatory sentencing policies that barred judges from deciding who goes to jail and for how long. Instead, the laws required lengthy sentences — 15 years to life — for nonviolent, first-time offenders, many of whom would have received brief sentences, drug treatment or community service under previous laws.

Nearly all of the prisoners ended up in upstate New York, where failing farms and hollowed-out cities offered a lot of room for building. Politicians in these sparsely populated districts caught on quickly and began to lobby to have the new prisons located in their communities. As a result, nearly 30 percent of the people who were counted as moving into upstate New York during the 1990’s were prison inmates.

The influx of inmates has brought desperately needed jobs to the region and resulted in districts whose economies revolve around prison payrolls and whose politics are dominated by the union that represents corrections officers. The inmates also helped to save political careers in areas where legislative districts were in danger of having to be merged because of shrinking populations. Inmates, as it turned out, were magically transformed into ‘’residents,'’ thanks to a quirk in the census rules that counts them as living at their prisons. Although people sentenced under the drug laws frequently serve long sentences, many prisoners remain behind bars only briefly before returning to homes that are often hundreds of miles away.

Felons are barred from voting in 48 of 50 states — including New York. Yet in New York, as in the rest of the country, disenfranchised prisoners are included in the population counts that become the basis for drawing legislative districts.

An eye-opening analysis by Prison Policy Initiative’s Peter Wagner found seven upstate New York Senate districts that meet minimal population requirements only because prison inmates are included in the count. New York is not alone. The group’s researchers have found 21 counties nationally where at least 21 percent of the ‘’residents'’ were inmates.

The New York Republican Party uses its majority in the State Senate to maintain political power through fat years and lean. The Senate Republicans, in turn, rely on their large upstate delegation to keep that majority. Whether those legislators have consciously made the connection or not, it’s hard to escape the fact that bulging prisons are good for their districts. The advantages extend beyond jobs and political gerrymandering. By counting unemployed inmates as residents, the prison counties lower their per capita incomes — and increase the portion they get of federal funds for the poor. This results in a transfer of federal cash from places that can’t afford to lose it to places that don’t deserve it.

Lately, polls have shown growing support for drug law reform. In November, prominent New York Republicans ran into trouble when they faced candidates who made Rockefeller reform an issue. In response, the State Senate endorsed a plan that cut sentences for drug possession crimes, which was the easy part. But it stonewalled on the crucial change, which would have returned to judges the discretion to sentence at least some offenders to drug treatment instead of prison.

While other political forces support the mandatory sentences — most notably the powerful local prosecutors — prison rights advocates have recently begun to argue that prison district politicians are more concerned about keeping the prisons full than about crime. The idea of counting inmates as voters in the counties that imprison them is particularly repulsive given that inmates are nearly always stripped of the right to vote. The practice recalls the early United States under slavery, when slaves were barred from voting but counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of apportioning representation in Congress.

Census Bureau’s method of counting prisoners steals political clout from Las Vegas and Reno

by Peter Wagner, December 20, 2004 Link

Current system favors rural counties at the Nevada Legislature

The Census Bureau’s method of counting prisoners reduces the population of Nevada’s urban areas and transfers political clout to rural districts, according to a report released last week by the Prison Policy Initiative, an organization that conducts research and advocacy on incarceration policy, and the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada.

A little known quirk in the Census counts people in prison as if they were residents of the prison town. “This inflates the population of rural areas that host prisons, and shortchanges the areas most prisoners come from,” said report author Peter Wagner.

Nevada’s prison population grew five times larger from 1980 to 2000, which accentuates the problem. The biggest beneficiary of this Census counting practice is Pershing County, one of the 21 counties in the country that has at least 21% of its Census population in prison.

The largest losers are Reno and Las Vegas where most of the prisoners come from, and anyone who needs accurate statistics. For example, the Census reports that Pershing County more than doubled its Black population in the 1990s. But that is the prison population growing, not the actual residents of the county.

“By counting prisoners as residents of rural counties, the Census Bureau steals the political clout that rightly belongs in Las Vegas and Reno and this is wrong,” said Bob Fulkerson State Director of PLAN. “Our lawmakers should demand that the Census Bureau change the way it counts prisoners. The way they do it now flies in the face of our state’s Constitution.”

Fulkerson noted that Nevada’s Constitution explicitly states that a prison cannot be a residence. He said state officials need to notify the Census Bureau now that it needs to change the way it counts prisoners in Nevada, so that the next redistricting is done correctly.

Changing the numbers changes how democracy works, because legislative districts must be redrawn each decade to reflect the new population numbers from the Census.

“Miscounting prisoners changes the way that state legislative districts are drawn,” said Wagner. “This census policy creates an inaccurate picture of our communities, and state legislatures that rely on Census data likely violate the constitutional principle of one person one vote.”

The report identifies one district, Assembly District 35 that is 5.5% prisoners. Prisoners can’t vote in Nevada, and on their release they will be returning to their home communities, but their presence at the prison town in the Census dilutes the votes of their family members back home.

“Every group of 95 residents in District 35 gets as much of a say over state affairs as 100 people in Las Vegas or Reno,” said Wagner. “The Supreme Court’s ‘One Person One Vote’ rule was supposed to eliminate such large differences in voting power.”

The report also notes that Nevada’s African American communities are adversely affected by the Census Bureau’s outdated counting methods. It states that Blacks are almost 7 percent of Nevada’s population, yet more than 27 percent of prisoners are Black. Blacks in Nevada are incarcerated at four times the rate of Whites.

“The way the Census Bureau counts prisoners diminishes the political clout of our cities and in particular the Black neighborhoods of our cities,” said Dean Ishman, President of the Las Vegas Branch of the NAACP. “We must change the way the Bureau counts prisoners-it is a question of basic fairness.”

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The report is available at http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/nevada/

New tool allows researchers to find correctional facilities in Census data

by Peter Wagner, December 13, 2004 Link

As Rose Heyer and I wrote in Too Big to Ignore, How counting people in prisons distorted Census 2000, the Census Bureau’s decision to count incarcerated people as residents of the places with the prisons rather of their homes, leads to distorted data and some misleading conclusions about our communities. We wrote that statistics about size, growth, wealth, race, ethnicity and gender of communities are all affected.

Until recently, no online mapping tool existed to help you locate correctional facilities. The only two options were to hope that exactly what you needed has already been published on this website, or find the populations yourself in the particular tables of the text-based American Factfinder from the Census Bureau. Given the complexity of Census Bureau geography, this is complex task without the assistance of maps.

Bill Cooper of Fairdata2000 has added the various group quarters populations to his excellent online mapping tool for income, housing, language, and education statistics. The new tool allows researchers to look at counties or smaller levels of geography and see what percentage of the population consists of people in correctional facilities. He has also provided downloadable versions of this data to help other facilitate further analysis by more advanced users.

For example, I recently met a researcher who monitors bank compliance with fair lending laws. She said that it sometimes appears that a bank is not investing in an area in violation of the law, when in actuality the population in that area consists of people in a correctional facility not eligible to take out a mortgage.

Other organizations use maps that show the percentage of voting age people of various races that are not yet registered to vote in order to determine where voter-registration drives should take place. But a town that has markedly less enrolled voters than its neighbors may not be a prime target for expensive door to door efforts if all of the unregistered voters in the town are the product of a Census Bureau glitch that credits disenfranchised prisoners to the prison town.

This new tool makes it possible to find correctional populations in the Census Bureau data in a reasonable amount of time. When you see unexpected results in Census data, this new mapping tool allows you to confirm the most likely cause of unexpected results in the Census data.

Of course, if the Census Bureau updated its methodology and counted incarcerated people at their pre-incarceration residences; tools like this would not be necessary. The Census would then be able to fulfill its slogan of “Helping you make informed decisions” without the public needing to first double check on the Fairdata2000 site that their potential decisions are actually properly informed.