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Prisoner of the Census Analysis:
Counting Urban Prisoners as Rural Residents Counts
Out Democracy
in New York Senate
by Peter Wagner December 1, 2003
The inmates at Attica prison
in western New York state are represented in
Albany by state Sen. Dale Volker, a conservative
Republican who says it's a good thing his captive
constituents can't vote, because if they could,
"They would never vote for me." ...
Senator Volker made his career
pushing prison expansion and the criminalization
of drug use. He calls himself the "Keeper
of the Keys" for his control of where new
prisons are built. Because the U.S. Census counts
prisoners where they are incarcerated, Volker
gets to include the prisoners when redrawing his
district lines each decade to ensure that he has
the same population as other districts. Equal-sized
districts are necessary to ensure that all citizens
have an equally weighted vote.
Counting prisoners where they
are incarcerated, and not where they are from,
undercuts this one person one vote policy. Look
at the "constituents" in Senator Volker's
district:
- Officially, the district is
overwhelmingly white (94.2% White, 2.13% Black),
but even that little diversity is from the prisoners.
The 8,951 prisoners are 77% Black or Latino.
Without the prisoners, the district would be
96.5% White and 0.64% Black.
- Prisoners are not an interest
group native to the rural 59th district. Eighty-five
percent of the prisoners come from urban or
suburban areas: New York City (53%), suburban
New York City (8.6%) or the upstate urban cities
(23%). The remainder come not necessarily from
Volker's rural district, but from all the state's
rural areas combined.
- The 213,402 free adults in
the district live with 71,903 children. The
8,951 prisoners, on the other hand, report having
at least 11,358 living children, but they probably
get to see them infrequently. The driving distance
between the most well-known prison in the district,
Attica, and New York City, is 369 miles.
- Politically, the prisoners
and the real constituents don't have much in
common. Prisons are a major industry in the
district, with an estimated 3,000 people working
directly for the prison system. The 8,951 prisoners,
including 2,391 incarcerated for drug offenses,
presumably would support alternatives to incarceration
including treatment for drug addiction over
expensive incarceration.
Rural prison towns do not share
a "community of interest" with urban
prisoners or their loved ones. In fact, they are
often in contradiction. Senator Dale Volker told
Newhouse News Service he does get letters from
prisoners with a variety of complaints, but that
his real attention is directed toward corrections
workers, with whom he has forged strong relationships.
There is nothing necessarily
wrong with a Senator preferring one group of constituents
over another. But the fact that Senator Volker
treats prisoners as if they didn't actually live
in the district suggests both the problem and
the solution. Urban prisoners are not a part of
rural districts and they should be counted among
their own constituency: at home.
References:
Senator Volker quotes from Jonathan Tilove, Minority
Prison Inmates Skew Local Populations as States
Redistrict Newhouse News Service, March 12, 2002;
statistics from Importing Constituents: Prisoners
and Political Clout in New York and my own analysis
of Census 2000, NYS DOCs data and Senator Volker's
new district.
Prisoners
of the Census is produced by Soros Justice
Fellow Peter Wagner, Prison
Policy Initiative, PO Box 127 Northampton
MA 01061. pwagner@prisonpolicy.org
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