{"id":3993,"date":"2011-09-30T15:39:48","date_gmt":"2011-09-30T19:39:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/?p=3993"},"modified":"2011-10-03T11:40:54","modified_gmt":"2011-10-03T15:40:54","slug":"nyt-tx","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/2011\/09\/30\/nyt-tx\/","title":{"rendered":"New York Times: &#8220;Playing the Inmate Card Skews Redistricting&#8221; in Texas"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This morning, the <i>New York Times<\/i> printed an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/09\/30\/us\/for-redistricting-texas-counts-prisoners-where-they-sleep.html?_r=1\">article<\/a> on how prison-based gerrymandering distorts democracy in <a href=\"\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/50states\/TX.html\">Texas<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Making some savvy observations about how prison-based gerrymandering is an issue for both state and local governments, the <i>Times<\/i> reports:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>In Anderson County \u2014 and in Bee, Karnes or Walker Counties \u2014 a significant part of the population is in prison. State prisoners in each of those places account for at least 19 percent of the total county population. Each Texas county has four county commissioners, elected from districts of equal size.<\/p>\n<p>Inmates can\u2019t vote, so counties can ignore the prison populations when they draw those districts. For redistricting purposes at the county level, the prisoners simply don\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n<p>The state, on the other hand, counts them, adding to the populations of districts that have large prisons. Because rural legislators like Representatives Jose Aliseda, Byron Cook, Tim Kleinschmidt and John Otto, all Republicans, have prisons in their districts, they each have big populations of ineligible voters \u2014 criminals who aren\u2019t included in county maps, who can\u2019t vote, and who don\u2019t really have a stake in local affairs.<\/p>\n<p>And maybe they shouldn\u2019t: The prisoners don\u2019t come from those counties. They tend to come from the state\u2019s populous counties, like Harris and Dallas. And in Harris County\u2019s case, not counting them as residents means one state representative fewer in the local delegation.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This morning the New York Times printed an article on how prison-based gerrymandering distorts democracy in Texas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-3993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-shorts","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3993","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\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3993\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3993"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=3993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}