Last week the United State Census Bureau released a new data file giving states new opportunities to correct the decades-old problem of prison-based gerrymandering.
Prison-based gerrymandering occurs when the thousands of people incarcerated in state and federal prisons are counted by the Census as residents of the districts where they are incarcerated rather than residents of their home communities, where most inmates will return upon release. These two addresses are usually far apart. When tied with the nation’s significant rate of incarceration, prison-based gerrymandering leads to a systematic distortion of the population in some districts. Districts with prisons are constructed by counting “ghost voters,” or inmates, toward the district size but who, with few exceptions, are not permitted to vote. Furthermore, inmates rarely have any connection to other residents and communities in the district where they are incarcerated. Prison-based gerrymandering inflates the political power of residents in prison districts, and deflates the power of residents everywhere else.
Last year, the Census Bureau agreed to release a new data product that will provide states with information and greater flexibility to remove people in prison from the prison districts and reallocate them to their home communities for redistricting.
On April 20, the Census Bureau released an early version of the group quarters data that will include adult correctional facilities in addition to juvenile facilities, nursing facilities and other institutional and non-institutional facilities. The data will have information for states in addition to smaller categories such as counties, census tracts and geographical blocks. The data will allow states to identify and use effectively prison population information for state and local redistricting purposes.
This data will be particularly useful for New York. As New York gears up for redistricting, the Census Bureau has made it easier for the state to follow its new legislation that put an end to prison-based gerrymandering. In summer 2010, lawmakers in Albany passed a bill that mandated that redistricting officials to allocate people in prison to their home communities rather than to the districts where they are incarcerated. Maryland and Delaware passed similar legislation last year.
Earlier this month, several New York legislators filed a lawsuit challenging the New York law. As the New York Times recently editorialized, people incarcerated in large correctional facilities run by the state cannot be considered true residents of the county or district in which they are incarcerated. The new group quarters data allows states and localities to correct the skew caused by prison-based gerrymandering.
This summer the New York legislature took decisive action to create two important policy reforms: requiring that people in prison be allocated to their home communities for redistricting purposes; and requiring criminal justice agencies to provide voting rights information to people who are again eligible to vote after a felony conviction. While Albany has long been labeled “dysfunctional,” these particular reforms actually stand to make aspects of our state government models for democratic fairness and participation.
Both proposals are long overdue and have been introduced again and again and again, and both have garnered strong support in the legislature. Nevertheless, political wrangling repeatedly stymied their progress. This year, democracy trumped politics. Well, not quite. The legislation was pushed through in the budget revenue bill with no public hearing or debate. We will continue to criticize Albany for passing legislation behind closed doors with no opportunity for public input. But that’s for another post. Here, we hail the result.
The first reform assures that long under-represented communities have a full and fair voice in our state government. At present, incarcerated individuals are counted for federal Census purposes as residents where they are incarcerated rather than as residents of their home communities. In New York, where people are often imprisoned far from home and incarceration rates have skyrocketed in the last decade, this policy has produced increasingly harmful results. Public officials in prison districts have an incentive to build their districts on the backs of “ghost voters,” packing in prisoners who count toward the district size but who are not permitted to vote. So while officials who profit from the prison economy have an outsized voice in incarceration policy, the voting strength of the home communities – to which the vast majority of incarcerated people return – is diluted, resulting in under-representation in our state government.
The new legislation requires the Department of Correctional Services to provide the legislature with the necessary information to determine the home addresses for people in prison, and it instructs that incarcerated people should be allocated back to their home communities for redistricting purposes. This corrects a skew that has decimated the voting strength of poor and minority communities for decades, and assures that all communities in New York have equal representation and an equal voice in our government. Both Maryland and Delaware recently passed similar legislation.
The second policy reform is no less urgent. It will correct years of misinformation, promote successful reintegration and help protect public safety, while building civic participation among traditionally disenfranchised communities. Reliable information about voting rights is needed to address widespread, persistent, and well-documented misinformation in New York. Under New York law, people convicted of a felony lose the right to vote while in prison and parole. People on probation do not lose the right to vote. Once someone serves his maximum prison sentence or is discharged from parole, his right to vote is automatically restored. He need do nothing more than fill out a voter registration form like everyone else. Nevertheless, New York election officials have consistently misapplied the law and some have required people to provide unnecessary (and sometimes nonexistent) paperwork before being allowed to register. Not surprisingly, this confusion among election officials has affected the public. In 2005, researchers found that nearly 30% of people with criminal convictions surveyed in New York thought they would never be eligible to vote again.
New York’s new law is the latest in a national trend. Twenty-four other states and New York City already require certain state and local agencies to inform people when their voting rights are restored following a criminal conviction. It is a simple, workable policy that promises to have a major impact in assuring successful reintegration and reduced recidivism. Last year a retired New York parole chief testified before the New York Senate Elections Committee, “having the right to vote and learning how to exercise that right gives one a voice and a stake in the community; it promotes positive behavior and serves as a powerful conduit for making the transition from criminal to becoming a law abiding member of the community.”
The political jousting and escalating rhetoric of this seemingly endless New York budget season have been baffling, and at times excruciating. But this legislation shows that sometimes behind the shenanigans important policy reforms can be achieved. These two proposals in particular have the potential to make at least some aspects of our representative government a model for the rest of the country, and that’s not something we say lightly.
In early April, Maryland took a bold step that corrects at least one democratic abuse of its prison population. On April 13, Governor Martin O’Malley signed into law the No Representation Without Population Act. This Act counts individuals who are in prison in their home districts rather than the districts where they are currently incarcerated, when redistricting.
The No Representation Without Population Act ends what many refer to as “prison-based gerrymandering” – a practice that artificially inflates the voting power of prison districts where people in prison are not permitted to vote, while diminishing the power of the prisoners’ home communities where they ultimately return. Though most everyone else gets legislative representation based on their legal residence, Maryland used to ignore residency — which doesn’t change when an individual is imprisoned — for its incarcerated population. Now, the Act will count individuals in prison at their last known residence for Congressional, State and local redistricting.
The new law will help correct skewed representation of minority and urban communities across the state. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, 68% of Maryland’s incarcerated individuals are from Baltimore, but only 17% of the state’s individuals are incarcerated – and counted – in the city. The Act also significantly impacts minority representation: Under the new law, many of Maryland’s districts will no longer be built on the backs of mostly African-American “ghost voters,” who count towards district size but are not allowed to vote. Instead, these individuals in prison will be rightfully counted at home, benefiting their predominately African-American communities. Since the average length of stay in Maryland’s prison is just a few years, most people in prison will return home well before the next decennial census. Counting these individuals at their last known address gives them the accurate representation they deserve.
A recent change by the Census Bureau has made it possible for other states to go at least halfway toward correcting distorted redistricting data, as Maryland has done. The Bureau still tallies people in prison where they are incarcerated. But until this year, the Bureau only published prison counts identified as such well after most states have completed their redistricting process. In early February, they agreed to identify where correctional facilities were located early enough so that state and local redistricting bodies can choose to use this data to stop counting incarcerated individuals where they don’t belong, even if they’re not entirely sure where the right home address is. That’s at least a substantial step toward drawing fairer districts.
While more than 100 counties and local governments across the nation have refused to count prison populations at an incorrect address when redistricting, Maryland is the first state to also count them at home. Similar bills are pending in Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, New York and Rhode Island.
We applaud Maryland for starting what we hope is a trend among states. And we look to our state leaders to push for similar action nationally.
Yesterday, wordspread that the Census Bureau would make a powerful new tool available to the states, counties, and cities needing to redraw political districts after the 2010 census. Along with the standard datafile telling us how many people are assigned to any geographical slice of the country, the Bureau will tell us, at the same time, how many are incarcerated.
This is a big step toward correcting a problem that the Brennan Center’s been working on for most of the decade. Right now, people in prison show up in the census data at the blocks where they are incarcerated, rather than at the addresses they came from in their home communities. The two are usually far from each other. And with the nation’s rising incarceration rate, they lead to a systematic distortion of the population picture.
When districts are based on this data, they build the distortion into the distribution of local democracy. Districts are constructed on the backs of “ghost voters,” packing in prisoners who count toward the district size but who, with few exceptions, are not permitted to vote, and who have no connection at all to the other residents of the district or its welfare. This artificially inflates the political power of voters in prison districts, skewing the incentives of politicians there — and it artificially deflates the power of voters everywhere else. Peter Wagner has done an enormous amount of homework to show exactly how severe the distortion is, complete with a calculator to drive the math home.
For example, after the last census, 1300 of the 1400 people allotted to Ward 2 of the Anamosa, Iowa, city council were in prison. This left political power completely lopsided: the few others in ward 2 had far more leverage than any of their neighbors in town. Indeed, in districts so distorted, we’d hardly recognize what passes for democracy. In 2006, the city council seat for Anamosa’s Ward 2 was won with two write-in votes — one cast by the winner’s wife.
The right way to handle prison populations is to count people at their last known address before incarceration, which is where virtually all prisoners return when they are released. There are already bills afloat inatleastfivestates in this legislative session, on top of a federal bill, to accomplish just that (here’s a complete legislative list). And it’s already required by Mississippi law, at least for local districts. But the clock has run out on administrative capacity to do the same nationwide, for each and every facility, before redistricting starts.
So we turn to the next best thing: even where it’s not possible to get prisoners’ addresses right, it’s possible to take on half of the skew by ensuring that they’re not inflating the locations that are wrong. Instead, incarcerated populations would be addressed as part of the jurisdiction generally, without a more specific geographic tie, just like servicemembers and federal government personnel who are overseas on Census Day. These people are assigned to the state whence they came in order to apportion members of Congress, but not assigned to a specific address within that state that would affect redistricting.
Removing this half of the skew would not completely fix the prison distortion, by reconnecting the incarcerated population to the communities to which they most tangibly belong. But it would take a significant step toward making districts more fair. And this step would benefit all of the remaining voters in the jurisdiction, whose political power is now artificially diluted.
Some jurisdictions already do this. About 1/3 of the counties with prisons in New York State, for example, don’t tie prison populations to local districts. California counties with large prison populations have asked for permission to make the change; for Colorado counties, it’s required. Until yesterday, however, any new jurisdiction that wanted to follow these leaders had to go through the legwork of collecting the necessary data.
The Census Bureau’s new dataset eliminates that cost entirely. All you need to fix half of the skew is to use the Bureau’s incarceration numbers to reallocate prison populations from lopsided districts to the jurisdiction as a whole. And now that the Bureau will deliver incarceration counts at the same time as the other redistricting data, those that want to draw fairer districts, anywhere in the country, will find it much easier to do so.
This week’s New York Times featured an editorial decrying the state’s redistricting practices, with an illuminating set of accompanying maps. One of the best parts about the extremely thoughtful tandem: they focus on the right reasons for reform.
For example, consider former Sen. Velella’s district (NY34, also right). The Times does a particular service here, because – precisely as the material indicates – the primary reason why this district is abusive is NOT the reason that’s most apparent on first blush.
Most people look at the overall shape of this district and think something is awry, and many numerical measures feed that intuition. But part of the odd contours are caused by Long Island Sound, and the islands and waterways that don’t keep to neat and easy geometry. And most of the odd contours have to do with the fact that the bulk of the district is drawn around three other districts in the Bronx that give minorities an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice under the Voting Rights Act, and which make up the “hole” in the center of the district map. Much of the shape we think strange actually reflects values we support.
In truth, the real problems with this district – the real reasons to want change – are the parts the Times highlights. First, there’s Rikers, in the tail of the district to the south, which adds almost 13,000 unrepresented nonresidents to the district, and gives a boost to all of the other district’s residents at the expense of everyone else in the state.
And then there’s the curious little carve-out in the west (see bottom image to the right), slicing away the block around the house where Lorraine Coyle Koppell lived at the time. It’s hard to believe it’s a coincidence that Ms. Koppell got 46% of the vote against former Sen. Velella the year before the maps were drawn. You can see the map-drawers’ attention to detail best by comparing the districts in 2000 and 2002 (image right also): zoom in on the pushpin representing Ms. Koppell’s house. Nor is this sort of thing an anomaly: I’ve also blogged, with similar before-and-after maps, about the redistricting that notoriously lopped Barack Obama out of his district. And that’s just the most prominent example in a very large set.
These are exactly the sorts of problems that reform should be addressing. Big points to the Times for keeping their eye on what matters, rather than what first matters to the eye.
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