{"id":7396,"date":"2013-09-30T12:08:30","date_gmt":"2013-09-30T16:08:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/?p=7396"},"modified":"2021-11-17T12:50:52","modified_gmt":"2021-11-17T17:50:52","slug":"miami-herald","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/2013\/09\/30\/miami-herald\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Putting the con in constituent&#8221;: prison gerrymandering in Florida"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday&#8217;s <i>Miami Herald<\/i> ran a <a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20131224040019\/https:\/\/www.miamiherald.com\/2013\/09\/28\/3655483\/fred-grimm-putting-the-con-in.html\">great column<\/a> by Fred Grimm on why it&#8217;s time for Florida to do away with prison gerrymandering. The column begins:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>There\u2019s nothing a state rep loves more than a captive audience. Except for a captive constituency.<\/p>\n<p>North Florida pols have packed their state House districts with a particularly low-maintenance category of citizens. The kind who don\u2019t show up at townhall meetings clamoring about too much traffic or lousy parks or crumbling bridges or under-funded schools or the need for more cops on the beat. They never, ever complain about too few cops.<\/p>\n<p>Best of all they don\u2019t go around town grumbling that folks should vote for that other candidate. They can\u2019t. They can\u2019t vote. They\u2019re state prisoners.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>As Grimm explains, the Florida legislature hasn&#8217;t yet <a href=\"\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/legislation.html\">passed legislation<\/a> to prevent the Census Bureau&#8217;s prison count method from skewing state democracy. On the local level, however, many counties are taking action. County redistricting isn&#8217;t over yet in Florida, but we&#8217;ve already found that <a href=\"\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/local\/\">quite a few<\/a> counties refuse to pad their local districts with prison populations. Hopefully soon the state legislature will follow local governments&#8217; lead by ending prison gerrymandering statewide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;There\u2019s nothing a state rep loves more than a captive audience. Except for a captive constituency.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[31],"class_list":["post-7396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7396","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=7396"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9847,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7396\/revisions\/9847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7396"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=7396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}