Site menu:
New York
The prisoner miscount has had staggering impact on New York, skewing its legislative representation and misrepresenting its demographic makeup. New York City residents represent 66% of the prison population, and the vast majority of them (91%) are housed in upstate prisons. We have examined the cost to the citizens of New York in reports, articles, and graphical analyses.
- Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York (2002) is our district-by-district analysis of the inaccurate data's effects on state legislative redistricting.
- Gerrymandering and Relying on the Miscount of Prisoners Combine to Violate the U.S. Constitution in New York (2004) is a short graphical briefing that demonstrates the relationship between the prisoner miscount and unequal representation in the New York legislature. It is based on Chapter VI of Importing Constituents.
- Actual Constituents: Students and Political Clout in New York (2004) examines college students' rights as residents and the census' inclusion of prisoner "residents" for redistricting purposes.
- Further Research and Methodology Discussion (2005) uses newly discovered data sources to extend the findings of the original Importing Constituents report.
- Brief Amici Curiae In Support Of Plaintiff-Appellant Jalil Abdul Muntaqim, a/k/a/ Anthony Bottom, Urging Reversal Of The District Court (2005) is a friend of the court brief submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit by the National Voting Rights Institute and the Prison Policy Initiative. The brief argues that the Court should consider the New York State legislature's practice of crediting rural white counties with disenfranchised prisoners as part of the "totality of circumstances" which must be examined under the Voting Rights Act. (update)
Political Impact
Almost all of New York City's prison population is housed upstate, where the census and the legislature erroneously count them as residents. The 45th Senate District, for example, contains 12,989 prisoners, few of whom actually lived in the district before incarceration.
If prisoners were excluded from population counts, seven districts in the New York State Senate would be too small to count as districts.
Demographic Impact
The presence of a prison in a rural area can have a huge impact on Census Bureau statistics about the town or county. In several counties in New York, prisoners count for more than 2% of the county's population, and in Franklin County, prisoners constitute almost 11% of the census' count. As a result, prisoner demographics significantly skew the demographics for the "population" as a whole.
Artificial diversity: Rural New York is a predominately white area, but Census Bureau data changes the number of Black "residents" when it counts prisoners as population. In 8 rural New York counties, more than half of the reported Black population is incarcerated.
