Play (21:24 , 11.3MB)

Host: Peter Wagner, Executive Director, Prison Policy Initiative

Guest:

Bruce Riley, organizer at Direct Action for Rights and Equality, Providence Rhode Island


Recorded: June, 2010, Aired: August 2010

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.

Our guest today is Bruce Riley, an organizer at DARE in Rhode Island, Direct Action for Rights and Equality. Bruce has been spearheading the campaign to end prison-based gerrymandering in Rhode Island. Welcome, Bruce.

Bruce Reilly:

Hey, how are you?

Peter Wagner:

Very good, how are you?

Bruce Reilly:

I’m good. Glad to be here, trying to help other folks out in their battles and sharing whatever it is that I can share because we all have to work together. Otherwise we’re all left in our own little silos, and it’s not very efficient.

Peter Wagner:

So Rhode Island is a state that is looking very seriously at fixing prison-based gerrymandering. It’s a state that, until recently, this was not on the radar at all, so I was hoping you could tell us about that and what you’ve learned. But first, I was hoping, could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you, about DARE, and about your interest in this issue?

Bruce Reilly:

Sure. I am fortunate enough to work for a non-profit I used to volunteer for and be on the board. I started that work while I was in prison and this is the local group that works with prisoners of Rhode Island on issues systemically. We don’t have any staff lawyers, we don’t work on individual cases, although that gets looped in to working on the system issues. I got out five years ago, was a very active member on the outside, learned so much, brought some of my artistic skills into the organizing and the promo for things, learned a lot about computers as I went, started learning how to make my reports look fancy, and here we are. I happen to have seen at Brown University maybe five years ago one Peter Wagner do a presentation on the prison-based gerrymandering in New York State, and it always lingered in the back of my head. As we got closer to this census, I thought, hey, what’s the Rhode Island situation? How do we count our prisoners? And nobody knew the answer to it. And I was just like, somebody’s got to know. And so I ended up doing a little of my own research and found out that sure, it’s done just the way everybody else does it. I was able to get in touch with yourself and local people that would be interested. I managed to crunch the numbers on our own prison here. Particularly because I was familiar with each building, what the population was, where it was in the districts. I did the math and then I presented it publicly onto a blog that I contribute to, and then the ball started rolling. Here we are.

Peter Wagner:

So for people who have been following prison-based gerrymandering in other states, Rhode Island’s a little bit different. So where are all the prisons in Rhode Island?

Bruce Reilly:

We have one campus, which is different. The ACI is based in Cranston, Rhode Island, which is the town just off of Providence. It’s a very suburban town. Strip malls and housing developments, it has some wealth. It’s interesting how they have a lot of different sides to Cranston. It’s relatively vast, geographically. There’s two house districts, out of about five districts, I believe, that cover Cranston, some that lead into other towns. But two of them encompass the entire prison. Right down the middle of it–not necessarily numbers-wise, but more like geographically–is the border between these two districts, and they’re both within one senate district. Interestingly, one of the prison districts, House District 16, I believe, is the majority leader Nick Mattiello. He’s a Democrat. He’s considered a conservative guy. Our sponsors saw him as a straight shooter, one of those noble adversaries. So, we went to him with a few bills that were introduced at the beginning of the legislative session and had a meeting, Joe Almeida, myself, and Nick Mattiello. When this issue came up, laid it out for him, and he got it really quickly. He just was like, “That’s not right, sure. Go for it.” I just thought, wow, that was easy.

Peter Wagner:

So the majority leader has a large prison in his district, and when he thought about the issue, he thought that changing this made sense.

Bruce Reilly:

Yeah, he ended up having a quote in the paper. At one point, a reporter hit him up, and he said, probably a little tongue-in-cheek, “Yeah, I look forward to having more people in my district who can actually vote for me.” And in a way, humorously enough, he just hit the nail right on the head. It’s like, how many people in your district are really eligible to vote? Our districts are about 13,000 people, and he had about 1,500 in his district who aren’t even eligible. Because our districts are so small — unlike Chicago which has wards of 80,000 people — that 1,000 or 2,000 makes a serious dent in the numbers. And he had the smaller half of the prison. Peter Palumbo has the larger half.

It’s worth noting that Peter Palumbo has really made his name on being tough on crime. It has made national news that he wanted to introduce the infamous Arizona SB 1040, I believe is the number, to deputize all local law enforcement into federal agents. There’s a lot of commotion here between our group and allies, even, and people like the Tea Party who wanted to see those people rounded up. So this is Peter Palumbo who clearly is not representing all his residents because many of those residents are directly opposed to probably about 50% of those issues in votes. It’s an interesting contrast.

Peter Wagner:

I know that one thing you wanted to share with people in other states was some of your observations about what’s worked for messaging and what hasn’t worked, like how to explain this issue to people in terms of who wins and who loses and what’s at stake?

Bruce Reilly:

Right so, we had a hearing in the house judiciary pretty quickly. There were two key questions that came up from the legislators. The first one was more of a rhetorical question by a conservative rural politician. He’s a lawyer, so he has a pretty analytical mind, and I respect him. He says, “So, basically, everyone in the prison district,” you know, these two districts, “has more political power than everyone in all the other districts because there’s less people making the votes. So why wouldn’t every district, other than these two, support this bill?” We have 75 house districts. Representative Joe Almeida responded, “Hey, look brother, I won’t tell you how to vote, but I look out for my district. I suggest you look out for yours.” He kind of hit the nail on the head of just getting really quickly that obviously if I have ten people over here that have to come together for decisions. You have five people over there who have to come together for decisions. The five people have more power. And if you have to divide up resources, in any sense, even if it’s just votes or issues, ten people want to get their issues heard, five people want to get their issues heard. The five have more juice. They have more leeway. The ten have to clamber amongst themselves. They make different deals amongst themselves to get their five issues out there, whereas the other five get all their issues.

So the other question that came up was from Representative Amy Rice, also a lawyer, who was like, “Well, I don’t know if we have the power to do this. This is a federal question, right?” I said, “Well, interestingly enough, that doesn’t have to be answered. It’s here on your fact sheet provided by Prisons Policy and by Demos that I have for yo