Database prepared by PPI for redistricting professionals provides detailed demographics for the correctional population, including race, age and gender.
September 13, 2011
September 13, 2011 — A new database prepared by the Prison Policy Initiative for redistricting professionals provides detailed demographics for the correctional population, including race, age and gender. The database expands on the Census Bureau’s Advance Group Quarters Summary File released in April, which identified the population in each Census block that is incarcerated or in some other kind of group quarters.
Redistricting professionals consider it preferable to use the Census Bureau’s counts of correctional facilities when making adjustments to the redistricting data instead of relying on the correctional system or their own knowledge of where the facilities are located. Because the Census often mixes prison and non-prison populations in the same block, and occasionally does not enumerate prisons at their actual locations, the optimal way to identify correctional populations in the Census data is with actual Census data. Our database makes this easy.
Since the Group Quarters Summary File release in April, the Prison Policy Initiative has been working to make the data easier to use. Shortly after it’s release, we translated it into several more accessible formats, including an ESRI shapefile, a Google map and a table searchable by county or state. Some redistricting professionals have been frustrated that the data doesn’t include the names or types of facilities, or detailed demographic counts. Our new dataset fills these needs.
Since April, we’ve used 2010 vintage correctional system data to label the facilities in more than a third of the census blocks that contain correctional populations. (And more are being labeled each week.) This is particularly useful to redistricting professionals because they may wish to treat different types of correctional facilities differently for redistricting purposes, for example, reallocating state prison populations by not local jail populations.
Now, with the publication of Summary File 1, we’ve been able to pull in more detailed age, gender, race and ethnicity data for these populations for most of the blocks. This database is important because the Census Bureau often mixes prison and non-prison populations within the same block, so knowing the demographics of the block does not necessarily tell you the demographics of the prison population. We drew on different Census Bureau data tables depending on the specific circumstances in each block. For example, if the prison is the entirety of a block, the data was easy to access, and we used a table that reports race/ethnicity for the institutionalized group quarters population where the correctional facilities were the only institutionalized group quarter in the block. For other circumstances, we developed other processes to extract the data, and each data element in our database has a full footnote with the source.
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It's time to pay attention to the lessons we learned 40 years ago from the Attica prison rebellion, and recognize the critical differences between where prisoners come from and where they are confined.
by Rose Heyer and Peter Wagner,
September 13, 2011
Forty years ago, thousands of people confined at the Attica prison in rural New York State rebelled, taking control of D-yard. The media was invited in to see the conditions and observe negotiations, so the whole world was watching when, forty years ago today, Governor Rockefeller ordered an assault on the prison, turning what was then the largest prison rebellion into the bloodiest. Forty-three people died, almost all from state police gunfire.
The rebellion and the investigation into its causes caused a fundamental reexamination of correctional policy throughout America, but the difficulties the state had in reforming Attica itself offers a powerful lens on the central role of geography and race in criminal justice policy.
Forty years ago, 63% of the people incarcerated at Attica were Black or Latino, but at that time there were no Blacks and only one Latino serving as guards. The prison population was 70% urban, mostly from New York City, but 80% of the guards were from rural New York.
The racial disparity between the keepers and the kept increased tensions at Attica, and gave Black and Latino prisoners a painful daily reminder that justice isn’t colorblind.
Many of the rebellion’s demands were common sense improvements to food, mail policies and rehabilitative programs, and were implemented nationwide in the years that followed. But the critical demand for more Black and Latino staff proved to be the most difficult to implement. The problem was not the hiring practices of the prisons, it was the locations of the prisons themselves. As leading scholar William Nagel explained shortly after the rebellion: “To avoid a federal Attica, the Federal Bureau of Prisons is now feverishly attempting to recruit black staff, but its task is complicated by the remoteness of its facilities.”
While existing prisons themselves are impossible to move, this lesson of Attica about the dangers of staff disparities was lost in the rush of the late 1980s and 1990s to build more prisons. Speculative ideas about rural economic development trumped safe and rehabilitative correctional policy. Two-thirds of new prisons were built in rural areas, despite the experience at Attica and despite research showing that keeping an incarcerated person close to home increases family visits and reduces the odds of recidivism or a return to prison. Thus, despite, a consensus that prisons should hire more Black and Latino staff, progress has been limited.
By 2005, (the latest year with complete comparative data), the incarcerated population at Attica had increased to 77% Black and Latino. But out of a total staff of 859, the number of blacks had only risen to 12 and the Latino staff to 9. Attica’s staff remains overwhelmingly white because Attica itself has not moved. Attica remains located in a rural, overwhelmingly white region of New York State.
Attica’s staffing pattern is dramatic, but nationally, it’s not atypical. The fact that Blacks and Latinos make up 57% of the nation’s incarcerated population but hold only 28% of the correctional jobs is further proof that the bulk of the nation’s prisons are still in communities that are very different than the communities that incarcerated people come from.
In part, these facts show how the prison system’s wild growth undermined its own goals. But from the perspective of voting rights, they tell a larger story about how mass incarceration dilutes the votes of individual Blacks and Latinos who don’t have any direct contact with the criminal justice system.
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The original U.S. Constitution used enslaved people to grant extra political clout to the states with lots of slaves, shifting the balance of power. This dynamic has a contemporary parallel.
by Leah Sakala,
September 9, 2011
I was recently watched some striking footage of a Wisconsin Assembly hearing from September, 2009, about Assembly Joint Resolution 63 to exclude incarcerated persons from redistricting data. The video begins with a discussion of how to count incarcerated people in Wisconsin, but then quickly turns into a heated debate about how prison-based gerrymandering relates to our nation’s conflicted history with the concepts of personhood and equal representation. To me, the fact the conversation veered into such fundamental questions shows how sometimes the solutions to prison-based gerrymandering can be counterintuitive.
Here’s why:
When incarcerated people are counted as residents of the district in which they are incarcerated, the actual residents of that district get undue additional political clout and the voters who live everwhere else lose out. The ideal solution is to completely solve the problem by counting incarcerated people at their home addresses. But, although it may sound strange at first, the second best option is for incarcerated populations to be removed from redistricting data altogether. The video I watched was about this second approach. Wisconsin 2009 Assembly Joint Resolution 63 sponsored by Representative Fred Kessler proposed to remove prison counts from Wisconsin’s redistricting data.
But this idea didn’t sit well with Representative Kleefisch. Given the United States racially disproportionate incarceration rates and pernicious history of denying racial minorities their civil rights, he asked, doesn’t the proposal to exclude prisoners from redistricting counts hark back to the infamous practice of denying certain individuals their full personhood?
Representative Kelda Helen Roys responded to this question by drawing an apt historical connection to the infamous 1787 constitutional clause that counted each slave as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of Congressional redistricting, even though they were denied the right to vote. The three-fifths clause had the effect of using slave population numbers to artificially beef up the political power of the Southern, white, property-owning voters who were invested in maintaining and expanding the slave system. But the problem with the three-fifths clause wasn’t that the slaves were counted as only a fraction of a person. After all, since their “political clout” went right into the hands of the very people who exploited them, the political distortion would have been even greater had they been counted as full people. The problem was that slave populations were used to artificially inflate the political power of the very same people who went to great lengths to deny them their right to personal sovereignty, much less their right to vote.
When a government engages in prison-based gerrymandering, incarcerated people, who disproportionately come from minority and urban communities, are stripped of their right to vote but still included in the population counts of the disproportionately white districts in which they are incarcerated. Their political clout is essentially handed through the bars to the real residents of the community that contains the prison, giving certain people more political say simply by virtue of their residential proximity to a large prison. This also gives the legislators who represent districts that include prisons the power to use incarcerated people’s bodies to count against their own interests by supporting punitive criminal justice legislation, as such representatives are utterly free from accountability to their non-voting “constituents” behind bars.
It’s just as unfair as it sounds. And Representative Roys’s observation about the connection between prison-based gerrymandering and the three-fifths clause isn’t abstract history. Let’s look at a contemporary example.
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Prison Policy Initiative urges Governor Brown to sign California's bill to end prison-based gerrymandering.
by Aleks Kajstura,
September 8, 2011
California’s movement to end prison-based gerrymandering is in the home stretch. Yesterday, the Assembly passed the Senate’s amendments to AB 420, and the bill passed its last legislature hurtle. The bill will give the Citizens Redistricting Commission the data necessary to count incarcerated people at their home addresses. When Governor Brown signs AB 420 into law, California will join New York, Maryland, and Delaware in ensuring equality in representation for all residents.
I sent a letter in support of the bill to the Governor, urging him to sign it into law.
The bill will fix a longstanding conflict between Census Bureau practices and California law. Redistricting data provided by the Census Bureau does not count incarcerated people at their home address; rather it counts them at the location of a prison. This approach is incongruous with California law which specifies that incarceration does not change a person’s residence. The result is districts that are skewed by non-resident populations, diluting the voting strength of everyone who does not live near a prison.
We discovered that most California counties with large prisons have already taken steps to limiting the impact of prison populations on their County Supervisory Districts. These ten counties remove the prison population from their redistricting data. Solano County is one of the two counties that did not adjust the census data in redistricting last decade and as a result, every group of 9 people who actually live in District 4 (which contains the CSP Solano and California Medical Correctional Facility) were granted as much influence as 10 people in Solano’s other districts. This bill would make sure that no county’s districts are unintentionally distorted by prison populations as they were in Solano.
Prison Policy Initiative and Demos applaud the California Senate for passing AB 420, a bill to end prison-based gerrymandering.
August 31, 2011
Prison Policy Initiative and Demos Applaud Passage Of Prison Redistricting Legislation By California Senate, Call On State Assembly To Pass Law And Correct Unjust Census Figures
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Peter Wagner, (413) 527-0845,
Anna Pycior, apycior@demos.org, (212) 389-1408
Demos and the Prison Policy Initiative, two national public policy organizations, applaud the California Senate for passage yesterday of AB 420, a bill to end prison-based gerrymandering. Introduced by Assemblymember Mike Davis, the legislation would end the practice of treating incarcerated individuals as residents of the districts where they are temporarily confined, for redistricting purposes.
This legislation directs the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to report the last known addresses of incarcerated persons to the Secretary of State and the Citizens Redistricting Commission. The data will then be used to count incarcerated individuals as members of their home communities. If passed again by the California Assembly, the new rule would go into effect in the 2020 redistricting cycle.
“We applaud the California Senate for recognizing that it is a violation of California state law to continue the state’s practice of counting incarcerated individuals as residents of their prison localities for redistricting purposes,” said Brenda Wright, Democracy Program Director at Demos. “According to the California Election Code, ‘A person does not gain or lose a domicile solely by reason of his or her presence or absence from a place while… kept in an almshouse, asylum or prison,’” Wright added.
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Kelly, PA faces an expensive state recycling requirement due to Census miscounts.
by Leah Sakala,
August 31, 2011
A recent Danville News article reports that the residents of Kelly township, Pennsylvania may be forced to shoulder an unfair burden.
Pennsylvania’s Act 101 of 1988 mandates a curbside recycling system for any municipality with a population of 5,000 or more and a population density of 300 people per square mile, or with a total population of more than 10,000. With only 3,717 residents living in the Kelly community, one would imagine that Kelly would be exempt from the expensive requirement.
But official U.S. Census Bureau figures report that Kelly has nearly 5,500 people.
Where can all those extra “residents” be found? Behind bars in the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. Not only might it be inefficient to institute a curbside system for the relatively small population of Kelly, but the township wouldn’t be allowed to collect recycling from the penitentiary even if they wanted to—the prison’s recycling system is run entirely by the federal government.
The article reports that the Pennsylvania law doesn’t include a provision that would allow municipalities like Kelly to avoid the requirement. Darwin Swope, Legislative Aide to Rep. Fred Keller (R-Kreamer), believes that the lack of flexibility in the recycling provision likely has a wider effect, saying, “I’m sure Kelly is not the only municipality in the state encountering this problem.”
Turns out, he’s exactly right.
We’ve identified two other Pennsylvania municipalities where the prison population requires them to create a recycling program they otherwise would not be required to start: Newport township and, as of the 2010 Census, Somerset township. Newport’s official population is inflated by the number of people incarcerated SCI Retreat, and the people incarcerated in SCI Somerset and SCI Laurel Highlands are all added to Somerset’s real population [1].
The Pennsylvania recycling statute was clearly designed to only take effect in communities of sufficient size and density where it makes economic and practical sense to mandate curbside recycling. Surely the statute’s drafters did not intend for it to apply to small municipalities that include large prisons with their own separate recycling systems. This unintended effect is just one more example of the consequences of counting incarcerated people in communities to which they do not belong.
[1] The fact that Somerset township only recently made our list may be surprising to the people who track prison expansion in Pennsylvania because the prisons there aren’t new. Even though two large prisons were located within Somerset’s boundaries during the last redistricting cycle in 2000, the total population reported by the Census was under 10,000 and the density was less than 300 people/square mile, and so the municipality was exempt from the requirement. Somerset would have had to comply with the curbside recycling mandate in 2000, however, had the Census Bureau not mistakenly counted the larger of the two prisons, SCI Somerset, in a different municipality.
In his testimony, Dale Ho explains to Kentucky legislators why prison-based gerrymandering distorts democracy and urges them to develop a solution.
by Leah Sakala,
August 24, 2011
Yesterday, Dale Ho, Assistant Counsel with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), testified about the issue of prison-based gerrymandering before the Kentucky General Assembly’s Task Force on Elections, Constitutional Amendments, and Intergovernmental Affairs.
In his compelling testimony, Mr. Ho explained that prison-based gerrymandering distorts the allocation of political representation in Kentucky on both the county and the state level, pointing in particular to House Districts 59 and 77, where 8.1% and 5.6%, respectively, of the so-called “residents” are are behind bars. He also pointed out that both Kentucky state law and court rulings on the state and federal level unambiguously say that incarcerated people are not legal residents of the facility in which they are imprisoned.
Mr. Ho explained to the legislature that prison-based gerrymandering often has the effect of painting a false picture of racial demographics, illustrating this point with the example of Morgan County, where only 18 of the 611 African American county “residents” counted by the Census Bureau in 2000 were not incarcerated.
One Kentucky county, Boyle County, refused to engage in prison-based gerrymandering after the 2000 Census by excluding the prison population for redistricting purposes. Mr. Ho urged Kentucky to follow Boyle County’s lead and develop a state-wide plan to end prison-based gerrymandering.
For further coverage of Mr. Ho’s testimony, see this morning’s Richmond Register article.
LA Daily News publishes op-ed by Peter Wagner and Dale Ho in support of AB 420 to end prison-based gerrymandering in CA.
by Leah Sakala,
August 23, 2011
This morning the Los Angeles Daily News published a great op-ed by Peter Wagner, executive director of the Prison Policy Initiative, and Dale Ho, assistant counsel with the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, in support of California’s Assembly Bill 420 to end prison-based gerrymandering.
After providing a detailed overview about how prison-based gerrymandering distorts our democracy and “makes a mockery of the ‘one person, one vote’ principle,” the authors explain that the California Senate should pass AB 420 to make sure that prison-based gerrymandering doesn’t mar California redistricting next time around:
It is too late to solve this problem during the current redistricting cycle, which requires that new maps be finalized shortly. But legislation is currently headed to the State Senate floor that would make sure that prison-based gerrymandering does not continue to distort our democratic process during future redistricting cycles: Assembly Bill 420, sponsored by Assemblymember Mike Davis, which calls on the Citizens Redistricting Commission to allocate incarcerated individuals to their home communities during future redistricting cycles.
This legislation will not affect funding for federal or state programs; it simply seeks to ensure that our legislators each represent the same number of constituents, so that everyone is represented equally in the political process.
Corrective legislation in California, the nation’s largest and arguably most important state, would not only solve this problem here, it could pave the road for nationwide change. The Senate should pass AB 420, and take a stand for basic principles of fairness and equality in the redistricting process.
The California Senate is scheduled to vote on AB 420 this week.
Blogger asks citizens to urge the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission to release the data needed to bring an end to prison-based gerrymandering.
by Leah Sakala,
August 22, 2011
BlogforArizona.com blogger “AzBlueMeanie” has recently written a series of posts about the problem of prison-based gerrymandering in Arizona. Not only are the posts excellent, but they are also timely, as the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission (AIRC) is currently holding a series of public hearings to get feedback before drawing state redistricting maps in the near future.
- In the first post, AzBlueMeanie gives a general overview of why prison-based gerrymandering is a problem for Arizona’s democracy, using our materials to illustrate the issue.
- In the second post, AzBlueMeanie urges readers to raise the issue of prison-based gerrymandering at the Redistricting Commission’s public hearings, pointing to our Arizona page as a resource for supporting documents.
- Finally, AzBlueMeanie’s third post makes the great recommendation that Arizona citizens ask the Redistricting Commission to specifically identify incarcerated populations in the draft maps that they release to the public:
The key to your testimony at Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission (AIRC) public hearings is to request that the AIRC flag these census tract/blocks for prisons in their reports and identify incarcerated populations on the draft district maps under discussion so that they are readily identifiable to the public. This will facilitate knowledgeable public discussion, and will build a public record for Department of Justice Voting Rights Section preclearance of district maps, and a public record for any potential litigation.
AzBlueMeanie could not be more right.
Redistricting maps are hard to parse and analyze without detailed—and useful—summary data to accompany them. Accordingly, most redistricting committees produce summary tables with key demographics for each mapped district: race, ethnicity, voting age population, etc. In Arizona, a healthy discussion about proposed districts needs to include information about the number of people incarcerated in each district.
The Redistricting Commission isn’t, this decade at least, going to follow New York or Maryland and count incarcerated people at home. But, with some careful planning, they can minimize the effects of prison-based gerrymandering right now.
The Census Bureau is now making it easy for redistricting technicians to know which populations in their data are in fact incarcerated. But empowering the Arizona public to give meaningful feedback on the draft maps remains the job of the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission. True, residents of Arizona could hire demographers to perform analyses of draft maps to evaluate the extent of prison-based gerrymandering, but this is data that the Commission should already have at its fingertips. The public should take AzBlueMeanie’s advice and urge the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission to include data on the number of incarcerated people in their demographic summaries of each draft district.
Attorneys for 15 NY voters filed papers today asking Judge Devine to grant motion for summary judgment and uphold law ending prison-based gerrymandering.
August 19, 2011
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE August 19, 2011
Contact:
| Brennan Center for Justice |
Andrew Goldston |
(646) 292-8372 |
andrew.goldston@nyu.edu |
| Center for Law & Social Justice |
April Silver |
(718) 756-8501 |
pr@akilaworksongs.com |
| Demos |
Anna Pycior |
(212) 389-1408 |
apycior@demos.org |
| LatinoJustice |
John Garcia |
(212) 739-7513 |
jgarcia@latinojustice.org |
| NAACP-LDF |
Melquiades Gagarin |
(212) 965-2783 |
mgagarin@naacpldf.org |
| NYCLU |
Michael Cummings |
(212) 607-3300 x363 |
mcummings@nyclu.org |
| Prison Policy Initiative |
Peter Wagner |
(413) 527-0845 |
|
Albany, NY – Attorneys for the fifteen voters from around New York State who have joined the legal defense of New York’s law ending prison-based gerrymandering today filed papers asking New York Supreme Court Judge Eugene Devine to grant their motion for summary judgment and uphold the law. Their filing lays out why the judge should uphold the law and why a similar request from the Senators with large prisons in their districts should be denied. The case is Little v. LATFOR. The organizations representing these voters in court are the Brennan Center for Justice, the Center for Law and Social Justice, Dēmos, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, the New York Civil Liberties Union, and the Prison Policy Initiative..
On Aug. 4, Judge Devine granted the fifteen voters from across New York State permission to intervene in the lawsuit and join in the defense of the law. The original named defendants in the lawsuit are government bodies charged with carrying out the new law: the New York State Legislative Task Force on Demographic Research and Reapportionment (LATFOR), and the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS). The New York State Attorney General’s office is representing DOCCS.
The new law, known as “Part XX,” requires that incarcerated persons be allocated to their home communities for redistricting and reapportionment. This tracks with the New York State Constitution’s explicit provision that incarceration does not change one’s residence. Part XX applies to state and local legislative redistricting, and would not affect federal funding distributions.
New York State Senator Elizabeth Little and a group of co-plaintiffs are seeking to restore the old policy, which inflated the voting weight of a few communities at the expense of all others by allocating incarcerated persons to the districts where prisons are located, rather than to their home addresses.
Related Issues
Separate from the lawsuit, on August 4, the New York State Legislative Task Force on Demographic Research and Reapportionment announced that it would it would comply with the law. This is a dramatic change for LATFOR, whose co-chair, Senator Nozzolio, represents a district that includes several large prisons. LATFOR had previously been implying that it was not going to implement the law.
This pledge to follow the law came after a flurry of public criticism prompted by the seven civil rights organizations representing the intervenors. On July 27, the seven civil rights organizations representing the intervenors wrote to LATFOR, explaining that LATFOR must comply with the law. LATFOR had also received intense criticism from editorial boards around the state, including the Albany Times Union , the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle and the New York Times.
Public opinion is clearly against prison-based gerrymandering. A Quinnipiac University poll released last week reported that a majority of New York State voters say “that prison inmates should be counted as residents of their home districts, not of where they’re imprisoned.” The poll found that majorities of voters from both parties, and majorities of both upstate and downstate voters, favored “counting inmates in their homes, not their prisons.”
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