Voting rights advocates have been pressing the Census Bureau for more than a decade to stop counting prison inmates as “residents” of prisons — where they typically remain for only a short time — instead of the communities they call home. The bureau, in a rejection of common sense and fairness, has proposed rules for the 2020 census that continue this discredited practice.
Voting rights advocates have been pressing the Census Bureau for more than a decade to stop counting prison inmates as “residents” of prisons — where they typically remain for only a short time — instead of the communities they call home. The bureau, in a rejection of common sense and fairness, has proposed rules for the 2020 census that continue this discredited practice.
Counting inmates this way allows legislators who draw electoral lines to inflate the power of certain areas with “constituents” who have been stripped of the right to vote and have no interaction with the larger community.
This practice made little difference during the 1950s and ’60s, when the prison population was relatively small. But with about 1.5 million people in prison today, it is easier for lawmakers to pad sparsely populated districts to ensure that they pass muster under federal law. This subverts the principle of one person one vote, shifting political influence from one end of a county or state to another.
The Census Bureau was made aware of this problem a decade ago, when a report it commissioned from the National Research Council found that its method for counting inmates distorted the political process and raised “legitimate concerns” about “equity and fairness in the census.”
The federal courts have recently begun to see this gerrymandering as a threat to electoral fairness. In May, for example, a U.S. District Court held that the city of Cranston, Rhode Island, had violated the principle of one person one vote by deeming inmates at a correctional facility “residents” for the drawing of district lines for the city council and the local school committee.
The court rightly found that the inmates who made up about 25 percent of Cranston’s Ward 6 were not true constituents. According to court documents, their median length of stay was only 99 days, which can in no way be seen as permanent residency. Those convicted of felonies were barred from voting. And inmates held for reasons other than a felony conviction, the court pointed out, were able to vote — but only by absentee ballot based on their addresses before incarceration. This meant that every seven voters in Ward 6 had the same political power as 10 voters in the city’s other wards.
Some states can prevent prison-based gerrymandering by simply counting incarcerated people at their home addresses.
But according to an analysis by the Prison Policy Initiative, some states are prohibited by law from adjusting census data when drawing district lines. In other words, the principle of one person one vote will continue to suffer until the Census Bureau changes the way it counts prisoners.
— New York Times