The Census Count of Prisoners is Inflating the size of Republican Districts
Tuesday, September 28, 2004 at 06:54PM The electoral implications of how we treat felons have been hotly
debated since the 2000 election, when Florida's felon
disenfranchisement policies may have helped tip the state to Bush. How
the census counts prisoners may seem a marginal concern compared with
the disenfranchisement of significant numbers of minority voters.
(According to two studies released this week, one in five black men
in Rhode Island and one in eight in Georgia are barred from voting due
to a prior conviction.) But the prisoner count is more than a mere
clerical matter. Census figures are used to draw legislative districts,
and, to a lesser degree, to determine the allocation of state and
federal funds. As a result,
Wagner argues, urban, Democratic districts with high incarceration
rates are losing political clout to the rural, Republican districts
where prisons are increasingly being built. Across the country most
felons are being nominally represented by legislators who not only can
safely ignore them - inmates can't vote in 48 states - but whose
political fortunes are tied to the growth of the corrections industry.
With a national prison population of 1.5 million (plus 700,000 in local
jails) and growing, the result, Wagner argues, is a fundamental
distortion of the democratic process. [more 
]
- Temporary populations change the political face of New York; 98% of NY's prison cells are in Republican Senate Districts [more ]
