By: From Newsweek: Do Rural Prisons Benefit Locals? « Places & Prisons

From Newsweek: Do Rural Prisons Benefit Locals? « Places & Prisons — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 22:41:18 +0000

[...] In the most recent Newsweek, writer Ben Adler peels back the layered benefits to prisons in upstate New York via the lens of his own family: in 1983, a summer resort run by his great-grandparents was transformed into Sullivan Correctional Facility. As New York state’s prison population swelled from 13,000 in 1970 to over 70,000 today, housing inmates from NYC became a lucrative business for otherwise destitute upstate towns. “Ironically, the prisoners—mostly low-income men of color—bring two things they themselves lack: economic and political power,” writes Adler. That’s because during the Census, those tens of thousands of prisoners are counted in the rural places in which they are imprisoned rather than their homes, even though they cannot vote. The result is an skewed diversion of legislative clout to sparsely-populated, rural towns — often called prison-based gerrymandering. [...]

By: How the Prison Industrial Complex affects the regular voter : Dr. Lester K. Spence

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 17:40:47 +0000

[...] linked to New York Times editorial condemning the use of prisoners in counting local populations. (ed: the previous version linked to an earlier story. thanks Peter for the heads [...]

Comments on: Phantom Voters in New York — New York Times editorial

By: From Newsweek: Do Rural Prisons Benefit Locals? « Places & Prisons

By: How the Prison Industrial Complex affects the regular voter : Dr. Lester K. Spence