{"id":7729,"date":"2014-04-01T11:55:52","date_gmt":"2014-04-01T15:55:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/?p=7729"},"modified":"2014-09-25T18:20:19","modified_gmt":"2014-09-25T22:20:19","slug":"ri-mattiello","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/2014\/04\/01\/ri-mattiello\/","title":{"rendered":"Edward Fitzpatrick: R.I\u2019s new House speaker has a captive constituency"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nToday, Ed Fitzpatrick, political columnist for the Providence journal, tackled prison gerrymandering in Rhode Island<\/a>:\n<\/p>\n

\n

\n[T]here\u2019s nothing unusual about the fact that new Democratic House Speaker Nicholas A. Mattiello now wields more power than if he were simply representing part of Cranston.\n<\/p>\n

\nBut there is one unusual thing about Mattiello\u2019s House district: 8.6 percent of the people in his district are inmates at the Adult Correctional Institutions, and the vast majority of those inmates can\u2019t vote for or against him, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, based in Easthampton, Mass.\n<\/p>\n

\n\u201cIt\u2019s representation without population,\u201d said the group\u2019s legal director, Aleks Kajstura. \u201cCounting incarcerated people as if they were residents of the ACI undermines the principle of one person, one vote.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to 2010 Census data, the ACI in Cranston houses 3,433 inmates, and many of them are ineligible to vote because they\u2019re behind bars for a felony conviction. About 1,000 of the inmates face misdemeanors or are awaiting trial and can still vote. But they must vote by absentee ballot using the address they had before they checked into A.T. Wall\u2019s graybar hotel (as I like to call it)….\n<\/p>\n

\n\u201c[Mattiello] has a responsibility to fix this problem, especially now that he is speaker,\u201d Prison Policy Initiative executive director Peter J. Wagner said Monday. \u201cThis is about fairness and what\u2019s right for the state. It\u2019s not one corner of Cranston. He has a responsibility to ensure all state residents equal representation in government.\u201d\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rhode Island’s new House speaker’s district is based on prison gerrymandering, flaunts “one person, one vote”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"coauthors":[30],"class_list":["post-7729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-shorts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7729","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\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7729"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=7729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}