Play (14:47 , 7.6MB)

Host: Peter Wagner, Executive Director, Prison Policy Initiative

Guest:

Dale Ho, Assistant Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense Fund

Recorded: June, 2010, Aired: November 2010

Transcript:

Peter Wagner:

Welcome to issues in prison-based gerrymandering, a podcast about keeping the Census Bureau’s prison count from harming our democracy. The Census Bureau counts people in prison as if they were actual residents of their prison cells, even though most state laws say that people in prison are residents of their homes. When prison counts are used to pad legislative districts, the weight of a vote starts to differ. If you live next to a large prison, your vote is worth more than one cast in a district without prisons. Prison-based gerrymandering distorts state legislative districts and has been known to create county legislative districts that contain more prisoners than voters. On each episode, we’ll talk with different voting rights experts about ways in which state and local governments can change the census and avoid prison-based gerrymandering.

Thank you for joining us, Dale. I was hoping you could introduce yourself and tell us about what you do at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and why the LDF is interested in addressing prison-based gerrymandering.

Dale Ho:

Thanks a lot, Peter. My name’s Dale Ho, and I’m assistant counsel in the political participation group at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. My work focuses on voting rights and election law, and we’re interested in the prison-based gerrymandering issue for a number of reasons.

First, and I think the most basic, reason is prison-based gerrymandering violates the fundamental principle of one person, one vote, the basic principle of political equality that everyone’s vote is supposed to be counted equally. But as we all know, because of prison-based gerrymandering, your vote and my vote doesn’t count as much as the vote of someone who lives in an election district that hosts a prison because the prison population is used to artificially inflate the population count and thus the political influence of those districts. So it’s an issue that really affects everyone.

I want to make that very, very clear because sometimes when the Legal Defense Fund talks about this issue, people think, once we walk into the room, oh this is a minority issue. This is an issue that just deals with communities of color. But I really want to make clear that this is an issue that affects everyone. It affects people regardless of race, and it affects people regardless of geographic region.

Now, all that being said, prison-based gerrymandering does have particularly harsh effects on communities of color, and I think the reason for that is that incarcerated populations are disproportionately people of color. So, take New York State, for an example. In New York State, 30% of the overall population is African American and Latino. But 77%, so, more than two-and-a-half times that rate, of the prison population is African American and Latino, and what prison-based gerrymandering does in New York State is, because the incarcerated population is so overwhelmingly people of color, it basically has the effect of unfairly transferring political power from communities of color to other regions of the state.

Peter Wagner:

Wow, so what kind of progress we have seen on prison-based gerrymandering?

Dale Ho:

We’ve seen tremendous progress. First of all, Maryland, you know, passed its legislation to correct for prison-based gerrymandering, which is fantastic. In New York, there are thirteen counties that already refuse to count incarcerated persons as residents when drawing their local election districts. So their county commissions or city council or school boards don’t count incarcerated persons as residents so there’s that. There’s pending legislation in other states as well. The Delaware House recently passed a bill that would end prison-based gerrymandering in Delaware. We have to see if that will get through the Senate but we’re optimistic about that.(*)

Peter Wagner:

And I understand that the LDF recently has a new publication about this.

Dale Ho:

That’s right. We published a report that came out on June 1st of this year, entitled, “Captive Constituents: Prison-Based Gerrymandering and the Distortion of Our Democracy.” The report basically lays out some of the facts that I’ve been describing. Really, to understand the importance of this issue and what a significant effect it has on our democracy is you have to contextualize it within the phenomenon of mass incarceration that we’ve seen over the past 40 or 50 years in this country.

So, in the 1970s, again, I’ll use New York State as an example, there were about 10,000 incarcerated people in New York State. By the year 2000, that number had reached over 70,000. It’s a little lower today, but it’s still significantly larger than it was 40 years ago. That mirrors trends nationally. Nationally, in the 1970s, we had a few hundred thousand people incarcerated. Now we have over two million people incarcerated. We have 5% of the world’s population but we have 25% of the world’s prisoners.

If you took the incarcerated population in the country and put them in one place, their population would be equal to our three smallest states combined, and if you use 2000 figures, they would have five votes in the electoral college. So I think it’s plain to see that where these populations are counted has tremendous, tremendous effects on the shape of our democracy and the distribution of political power and as I mentioned, because the incarcerated population is so disproportionately comprised of people of color, prison-based gerrymandering, by counting people in districts that are far from their homes, typically, really dilutes the voting strength of communities of color.

From our perspective, we have a problem of not only of the one person, one vote principle under the United States Constitution, but we also potentially have a problem with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which provides that minority voters are to have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. Well, if so many residents of minority communities and so many people of color are being counted to inflate the political power of other districts, I think it’s hard to say that there’s not some dilution of the voting power of communities of color in a way that really runs counter to the spirit and purpose of the Voting Rights Act.

Peter Wagner:

So we want to see an end to prison-based gerrymandering, but what is it that we want people to do to make that happen? What are your thoughts and the LDF’s thoughts about what we should be doing?

Dale Ho:

Well, I think that the efforts that people have been engaging in to push for legislative reform at the state level are a good place to start. We published this report because we wanted to educate community groups and community leaders and legislators about this issue. I think a lot of people sort of don’t really understand the basics of the issue. So when we start talking to people, we get all kinds of questions.

We get questions like, why are we counting incarcerated people at all when we draw election districts. Incarcerated people can’t vote. That’s generally true, but it’s not universally true. In Maine and Vermont, all incarcerated people can vote. And even in many other states, people who are incarcerated stay at a jail instead of at a state prison often have the opportunity to vote as well. But really, that’s sort of beside the point.

Whether or not someone can vote is irrelevant to whether or not they’re counted. In the redistricting process, there are all kinds of populations that can’t or don’t vote. Mi