Home > The prison effect on political landscape
By Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman
Christian Science Monitor
DURHAM, N.C. - The US prison boom of the past 30 years
– which has nearly doubled the number of state prisons
to more than 1,000 and increased the nation’s prison
population from 218,000 to 1.3 million - has had widely
recognized economic, political, and social effects.
But one important political effect of the forced
relocation of millions of inmates has been largely
overlooked: The dilution of the urban black vote to the
benefit of rural white communities.
A new Urban Institute report shows that inmates tend to
come from regions that are demographically distinct
from those in which their prisons are located. And
because the Census Bureau counts prison inmates as
residents of the legislative districts in which they’re
incarcerated, the relocation of inmates - who are not
allowed to vote in 48 states - skews both the
distribution of government funds and the apportionment
of legislative representation.
This is a particularly grievous injustice in an era in
which presidential and legislative races are won by
razor-thin margins.
The distortion in representation caused by enumeration
of prisoners tends to favor rural residents, whites,
and Republicans, at the expense of urban residents,
blacks, and Democrats.
In most states, prisons are disproportionately located
in rural areas, yet most inmates come from urban areas.
For example, in four state house districts in
Connecticut, inmates make up more than 10 percent of
the population. Each of these districts has low
population and is disproportionately white - except, of
course, for the inmate populations. And because of the
presence of inmates, these districts effectively get
about 10 percent more representation than they ought
to.
Similarly, in Florida, statistics show a correlation
between gains in representation from the presence of
prisons and partisan affiliation of voters. Counties
that gain population by importing prison inmates - and
thus increase their congressional and state legislative
representation - tend to vote Republican. Meanwhile,
counties that lose population and legislative
representation because a share of their population is
imprisoned in other counties tend to vote Democratic.
Besides affecting representation inside a state, prison
location has the potential to affect congressional
apportionment between states. Wisconsin, for example,
contracts to send as many as 10,000 inmates to prisons
in other states. Wisconsin politicians were so
concerned that the state would lose a congressional
seat after the 2000 Census because of this practice
that Republican Rep. Mark Green actually introduced
legislation to count those inmates as citizens of
Wisconsin. (In the end, the legislation didn’t pass,
and the seat was lost - though because of a larger
margin of population loss than the inmates accounted
for.)
This is only the most recent in a long line of
techniques for diluting the voting power of African-
Americans. And it’s uncomfortably reminiscent of the
infamous "three-gifths compromise." Under that clause
of the Constitution, which determined how
representation in the lower house of Congress would be
allocated, slaves were counted as three-fifths of a
person - although, of course, they weren’t allowed to
vote. The result was that the presence of
disenfranchised blacks in the South increased the
representation of white Southerners in the House.
Likewise, under the current method of counting prison
inmates, the presence of disenfranchised blacks in
rural prisons increases the representation of white,
rural, Republican voters both in the House and in state
legislatures.
Not only does counting inmates in the districts in
which they’re incarcerated dilute the African-American
vote and therefore violate the Voting Rights Act, it
creates unconstitutional inequalities in the number of
constituents per district, a violation of the
Fourteenth Amendment.
Since the "one man, one vote" Supreme Court rulings in
the ’60s requiring that legislative boundaries in each
state contain equal populations, the right of each
citizen to equal representation in the House and state
legislature has been a cornerstone of American
democracy. The postcensus redistricting is designed to
fulfill this critical goal of ensuring that each
legislative district has as close to an equal number of
constituents as possible.
The method of counting inmates where they’re
imprisoned, and not in their home districts undermines
this doctrine. Even in the eyes of the legislators
whose districts benefit from the presence of inmates,
those inmates are not their constituents. In a survey I
conducted of 40 Indiana state legislators, all -
Democrat and Republican, with or without a prison in
their district - said that inmates who are incarcerated
in other districts, but who have family members in
their district or lived there prior to incarceration,
are more truly their constituents than inmates from
other areas who happen to be incarcerated in their
district.
Thus this is further evidence that counting inmates in
the districts in which they’re incarcerated creates an
imbalance in the number of true constituents per
district.
The Census Bureau should count prison inmates at their
"homes of record." If the Census Bureau and Congress
refuse to act, then the courts must enforce the Voting
Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment and require a
change in enumeration methods.
In an era in which America has the largest prison
population in the world in both relative and absolute
terms, the topography of that population should not be
allowed to arbitrarily reshape the political landscape.
• Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman is a president’s
research fellow at Duke University.