{"id":6340,"date":"2012-09-13T08:36:51","date_gmt":"2012-09-13T12:36:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/?p=6340"},"modified":"2013-02-22T10:22:15","modified_gmt":"2013-02-22T15:22:15","slug":"california-counties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/2012\/09\/13\/california-counties\/","title":{"rendered":"For California Counties, Preventing Prison-Based Gerrymandering is the Norm"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nLast year, California became the 4th state to pass legislation ending prison-based gerrymandering for state legislative redistricting. Unlike the Maryland and New York laws, which apply to state legislative, county and municipal redistricting, the California law applies only to state legislative redistricting. But even though the law doesn\u2019t extend to local governments, many are taking action on their own.\n<\/p>\n

\nAs part of my summer law clerkship with the Prison Policy Initiative, I set out to determine how California counties with large prisons have traditionally addressed the problem of prison-based gerrymandering.\n<\/p>\n

\nI discovered that the same ten counties that the Prison Policy Initiative identified as having avoided prison-based gerrymandering after the 2000 Census<\/a> did so again after the 2010 Census. These are the 10 counties with the proportionally largest prison populations, so engaging in prison-based gerrymandering would have created the largest distortions of representation.\n<\/p>\n

\nWhen I was determining which California counties avoided prison-based gerrymandering, for the most part I had to analyze redistricting maps and data to calculate whether the prison populations were included or excluded in the district populations. <\/span>However, I came across four counties that, in their redistricting documentation, were explicit in their removal of prison populations to prevent prison-based gerrymandering.\n<\/p>\n

\nFor example, the Imperial County redistricting committee declared in a report that they decided to leave out the prison population early on in the redistricting process. In support of their decision, the committee pointed out that many California counties choose to exclude and also cited a 1991 California Attorney General opinion<\/a> supporting their decision.\n<\/p>\n

\nSimilarly, the counties of Del Norte, Monterey, and Kings were also explicit in avoiding prison-based gerrymandering. In Del Norte County, the county clerk\u2019s analysis of 2010 Census population information for the redistricting committee showed that the incarcerated population was subtracted from the \u201cnet population for redistricting purposes.\u201d In Monterey County, the citizen\u2019s redistricting committee expressed their decision to exclude prisoners in a report to the county supervisory board. And in Kings County, the supervisory district map published on the county website states that the given populations do not include the county\u2019s incarcerated population.\n<\/p>\n

\nOther counties that excluded the prison populations to avoid prison-based gerrymandering were Lassen County, Amador County, Tuolumne County, Madera County, Kern County, and San Luis Obispo County.\n<\/p>\n

\nI found four counties, each with proportionately smaller prison populations than the counties discussed above, that included the prison populations when drawing districts and therefore diluted the votes of all county residents who do not live next to the prison. These counties were Solano County, Marin County, Modoc County, and Santa Barbara County.\n<\/p>\n

\nThree of those counties have proportionally small prison populations compared to the population of individual districts, and the vote enhancement from prison-based gerrymandering ranged from 4% to 10%.\n<\/p>\n

\nIncluding the prison populations in redistricting data had the highest impact in Solano County, where District 4 was drawn to contain the 8,649 people incarcerated at the 4 largest correctional facilities in the county. So the Solano County Board of Supervisors gave the actual residents of District 4 11% more influence than people in other county supervisor districts.\n<\/p>\n

\nSolano County is of note because the county actually discussed avoiding prison-based gerrymandering. Citing an absence of guidance from the state, the Board of Supervisors chose to include the prison populations because that is what they had done in past decades.\n<\/p>\n

\nSolano struggled with the issue of counting prison populations in April of 2011. Then six months later, the state passed a law to count incarcerated people at home for the purposes of drawing state legislative districts. With a clear trend in the State to move away from using prison populations to distort districts, Solano now has compelling guidance to make the right choice in 2021.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Once again, ten California counties with large prison populations avoided prison-based gerrymandering when redrawing their board of supervisors’ districts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[36,30],"class_list":["post-6340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6340","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\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6340\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6340"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=6340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}