These principles are the embodiment of the “one-person, one-vote” rule, requiring legislative voting districts to each have about the same populations.  They protect equal representation in the state and federal legislatures.  In a state with a population of one million residents, that has ten assemblypersons or senators, each assemblyperson or senator should represent a district with a population of close to 100,000 residents.  Thus each of the ten district lines must be drawn so as to contain a closely equal number of residents to ensure that each elected district legislator represents about the same number of constituents.  These rules are the backbone of a representative democracy.

            Despite these apportionment rules, the system remains subject to manipulation.  For example, through gerrymandering, the practice of dividing a geographical area into electoral districts that gives a political party an unfair advantage by diluting the opposition’s voting strength.  A state in which 65% of the residents vote republican can redraw its district boundaries in such a way so as to ensure 100% democrat legislators are elected, and vice versa.

            To facilitate the one-person, one-vote principle at the federal level, the Constitution requires a national census of U.S. residents of each state every ten years.  Once the populations of the states are counted, the federal government determines how many representatives each state is entitled to in the U.S. House of Representatives.  The census is also used to determine how federal funds should be apportioned to each state.  While not required by the Constitution, nearly all state rely on the national census figures in drawing their own state and local district boundaries and distributing state funds.

            Drastically increased prison populations and the practice of counting prisoners out of state and district of origin combined with the manner of counting prisonters in the national census, and the states’ reliance thereon, has given rise to a new form of gerrymandering at both the sate and federal levels.

            The problem beings with the fact that in 48 out of the 50 U.S. states prisoners cannot vote.  Prisoners are, however, counted for purposes of the national census.  But those prisoners are counted as residents of the states and districts where they happen to be incarcerated instead of where they lived prior to incarceration (where their political interest lie) or where they will be released to.

            Many states incarcerate their prisoners out of the resident state through contracts with localities and private prisons in other states, where they are counted as residents for purposes of the census.  Most federal prisoners also are confined outside of their resident state.  At the federal level, this practice can and does strip states of U.S. Representatives, to which they are otherwise entitled, while potentially adding a U.S. Representative to states that are not entitled to the additional representation.

            The practice also affects state receipt of population-based amounts of federal funding.  Many national programs and social services allocate funds to states based on their resident populations, which is skewed when a state houses prisoners from other states where they are counted as residents, but receive no benefit from the additional funding.  Opponents of the practice of incarcerating prisoners out of state hope that this resulting loss of federal representation and funds will deter the practice, which manifests into major hardships for the prisoners and their loved ones.

            The Census Bureau’s miscounting of prisoners, however, has a much more profound impact at the state and local levels.  The majority of prisoners in any given state reside in urban districts of that state prior to incarceration, to which they will most likely return to when released.  The majority of prisons, on the other hand, are located in rural districts of any given state.  Because most states rely on the national census numbers when redistricting, the effect is the dilution of a state’s urban district representation while unfairly and artificially increasing the political clout of the state’s rural district residents.

            According to Prisoners of the Census, a special project to quantify, publicize, and reform the current practice of utilizing the census to shift political power away from poor and minority communities and into the hand of prison expansion proponents, 43,740 New York City residents in Census 2000 were counted by the Census Bureau in upstate New York prison cells.  92% of New York’s prison cells are in disproportionally white and republican assembly districts.  These miscalculations sorely undermine the one-person, one-vote principle, artificially boosting the resident populations of prison districts, and consequently increasing the weight of a prison-town vote while diluting the weight of a vote in the districts where those prisoners actually reside.  In a district comprised of 20% prisoners, for example, the votes of four residents carry the weight of five residents in other districts in the state.

            In addition to boosting the political clout of largely republican districts, the practice of counting urban resident prisoners as residents of the rural towns where they happen to be incarcerated causes federal and state funds to be diverted from the urban districts that need, and are entitled to, them and into the unentitled rural districts in disproportionate amounts.  These diverted funds include those destined for education, health care, crime prevention, community planning and a plethora of other services and programs.

            According to the Wall Street Journal, the small prison town of Florence, Arizona has 5,224 residents with another 11,830 people living in prisons located in the town.  The effect is that for every dollar in Florence’s budget generated by local fees and taxes, an additional $1.76 cines from state and federal allocutions based on the counting as residents of prisoners housed there, roughly 70% of the city’s population, who receive little or no benefit from the services that outside money pays for.  The same misappropriation of millions of dollars in funds from poor, urban districts to rural districts is occurring in every state throughout the nation.

            Numerous means of correcting these injustices have been proposed. As noted by Prisoners of the Census, no state is bound to use U.S. Census data, and many have a history of correcting what they view as census mistakes.  Indeed, New York, Illinois, and Texas have each proposed legislation adjusting population counts for purposes of redistricting to count prisoners as residents of the district in which they resided prior to incarceration.  Proposed federal legislation, requiring the Census Bureau to count prisoners confined out-of-state as residents of their own home state, died in Congress.

            The least popular corrective avenue, however, attacks the problem at its core: the disenfranchisement of prisoners.  Under the U.S. Constitution, states may disenfranchise prisoners from the voting process.  Most states do.  As noted, only two states permit prisoners to vote in local and national elections.  Indeed, under the U.S. Constitution no individual citizen has any individual right to vote for the president.  The Constitution merely provides that where states do not permit a popular vote, it may not discriminate in voting procedures and practices.

            Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.), in conjunction with the Chicago-based Rainbow Coalition, is spearheading a project aimed at securing a constitutional amendment that would protect all Americans’ individual rights to vote.  Amending the Constitution to give every citizen, including prisoners, a right to vote might not completely eradicate all of the issues involved with prison gerrymandering but it would certainly upset the political advantages of the practice and make the one-person, one-vote principle a greater reality for every American.

Sources:           http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/

                        Jesse L. Jackson Sr.; In These Times, April 18, 2005

                        Nicholas Kulish, Wall Street Journal, August 9, 2001