Frank Green has an excellent story in the Richmond Times-Dispatch<\/i> about the impact of prison-based gerrymandering in county government in Virginia. After the 2000 Census, the legislature passed a law allowing counties with census populations that are more than 12% incarcerated to exclude the prison population when drawing districts. Unfortunately, this left a number of counties with large prison populations ineligible for the new law and required to draw districts that give the prison districts extra influence.<\/p>\n
In Southampton County, for example, the residents who live near the prison have more than twice the influence over county affairs as residents of other districts.<\/span> Ideally, the legislature will change the law and allow all counties to exclude the prison populations from the districts if they wish.<\/p>\n For more information, see Frank Green’s article, Legislature urged to change prisoners’ role in districting<\/a> or our Virginia research page<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 2001 law designed to help some counties end prison-based gerrymandering should be expanded to give all counties the same power. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-1759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-shorts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1759\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1759"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}