Prison Gerrymandering

[trichcycler]

"But politicians also recognize the potential of prison gerrymandering. In 2012, when redistricting in Wyoming threatened to place two sitting state senators in the same district, one offered a solution: move the district’s border to include the 500 prisoners of Torrington Prison and exclude his house. The legislature passed his plan, which saved his seat. "

 

 

"Since America disproportionately jails minorities, judges sent black men from New York City, Chicago, and other cities to areas like upstate New York, where the Census counted them as part of prison towns. Since only two states allow felons to vote, the result is reminiscent of the Three-Fifths Compromise: the bodies of non-voting blacks inflate the political clout of voters in mostly white districts. 

Prisons can distort redistricting without anyone making a pernicious plan. As the below video from the Prison Policy Initiative demonstrates, New York State Assembly District 114 only meets New York’s minimum population requirement of 126,000 thanks to 9,000 prisoners. If the state did not include prisoners as residents, all of New York’s district lines would have to be redrawn, which could turn blue districts red, or vice-versa. "

 

 

https://priceonomics.com/how-does-prison-gerrymandering-work/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-reichert/what-is-prisonbased-gerry_b_704847.html

[AmishRnot4ganja]

Is this a Republican, democrat, or bipartisan thing?

[trichcycler]

Republicans learned the lesson - and got better at gerrymandering than Democrats.

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/27117-gerrymandering-a-plague-on-both-our-parties

So, at the very same moment that the American Civil Rights Movement had succeeded in newly empowering African Americans in the political sphere by securing passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, America’s white politicians decided to begin a massive new war on crime that would eventually undercut myriad gains of the Civil Rights Movement—particularly those promised by the Voting Rights Act itself.

 

From the War on Crime to Mass Incarceration

 

Thanks to LEAA and America’s post-1965 commitment to the War on Crime, and more specifically, thanks to the dramatic escalation of policing in cities across the nation as well as the legal changes wrought by an ever-intensifying War on Drugs, between 1970 and 2010 more people ended up in prison in this country than anywhere else in the world. At no other point in this nation’s recorded past had the economic, social, and political institutions of a country become so bound up with the practice of punishment.

At no other point in this nation’s recorded past had the economic, social, and political institutions of a country become so bound up with the practice of punishment.

By the year 2007, 1 in every 31 U.S. residents lived under some form of correctional supervision. By 2010, more than 7.3 million Americans had become entangled in the criminal justice system and 2 million of them were actually locked up in state and federal prisons. By 2011, 39,709 people in Louisiana  alone were living behind bars and 71,579 were either in jail, on probation, or on parole. And this was by no means a “southern” phenomenon. In Pennsylvania, 51,638 people were actually locked behind bars in 2011 and a full 346,268 lived under some form of correctional control by that year. 

The nation’s decision to embark on a massive War on Crime in the mid-1960s has had a profound impact on the way that American history evolved over the course of the later 20^th and into the 21^st centuries.  As we now know from countless studies, such staggering rates of incarceration have proven both socially devastating and economically destructive for wide swaths of this country—particularly those areas of America inhabited by people of color. This nation’s incarceration rate was hardly color blind. Eventually one in nine young black men were locked up in America and, by 2010, black women and girls too were being locked up at a record rate.

 

 

Diluting our Democracy

So how did this overwhelmingly racialized mass incarceration end up mattering to our very democracy? How is it that this act of locking up so many Americans, particularly Americans of color, itself distorted our political process and made it almost impossible for those most affected by mass incarceration to eliminate the policies that have undergirded it at the ballot box? The answer lies back in the 1870s and in a little-known caveat to the 14^th Amendment.

Ratifying the 14^th Amendment was one of Congress’s first efforts to broaden the franchise after the Civil War. A key worry among northern politicians, however, was that since white southerners could no longer rely on the notorious “three-fifths” rule to pad their own political power, they would now try to inflate their census population for the purposes of representation by counting African Americans as citizens while denying them to access the ballot.

So, to prevent any power grab on the part of ex-Confederates, Congress decided to add so-called Section 2 to the 14^th Amendment.  Firstly it stipulated that any state that “denied” the vote “to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States” would have its representation downsized in proportion to the number of individuals being disenfranchised. Secondly, Section 2 allowed for the disenfranchisement of otherwise eligible citizens—without affecting representation—if they had participated “in rebellion, or other crime.” The idea here was to keep those who had committed crimes against the Union and those who might still be in rebellion against the Union from wielding political power in the wake of the Civil War.

This latter provision of Section 2, however, proved damaging to black freedom—political and otherwise. Almost overnight, white southerners began policing African Americans with new zeal and charging them with “crimes” that had never before been on the books. Within a decade of the Civil War, thousands of African Americans found themselves leased out and locked up on prison plantations and in penitentiaries.

Southern whites, of course, profited from these new laws politically as well as economically. By making so many blacks into convicts, whites could deny them the right to vote under Section 2 without undermining their state’s census population for the purposes of political representation. And, because of another clause of another Amendment, the 13^th, which allowed the continuation of slavery for those who had committed a crime, these same white southerners were able to force thousands of newly imprisoned black southerners to work for free under the convict lease system.

Fast-forward 100 years when, in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, another War on Crime began that also, almost overnight, led to the mass imprisonment of this nation’s African American citizens. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/10/how-prisons-change-the-balance-of-power-in-america/280341/