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Issues in Criminal Justice (JF)
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By Kathryn Wiley|Published Date: January 29, 2010
New York could become the first state where prisoners are not considered residents of the district where they are incarcerated for purposes of determining the size of legislative districts, according to an article in the New York Times.
New York legislators are preparing for a heated fight over the home addresses of the state's 58,378 inmates as they anticipate how the 2010 census will reshape the electoral map. Counting inmates as “residents” to pad state legislative districts is an unsavory practice that exaggerates the political power of the largely rural districts where prisons are built and diminishes the power of the mainly urban districts where inmates come from and where they inevitably return.
The population figures being talked about are considerable. For instance, one out of every three people who moved to upstate New York in the last decade actually “moved” into newly constructed prisons.
Eyeing an opportunity to increase the size of their largely urban districts, Democrats are urging the state to count prisoners as residents of their last known address. They argue that counting them where they are held has unfairly increased the population of upstate districts where Republican voters predominate. Supporters of the change have framed the issue as a way to prevent the disenfranchisement of poor, mostly minority communities.
"The present rule takes people who come from and return to poor or black and Latino communities and transfers their value for reapportionment purposes to rural upstate districts that really have nothing to do with them," said Sen. Eric Schneiderman, a Democrat representing Manhattan.
Republicans argue this change would unfairly alter the way one group is counted without changing how other transient groups, such as university students and military families, are counted.
Justice Fellowship considers this a moral, rather than a political, issue. By claiming prisoners as constituents, lawmakers in these over-rated districts deprive prisoners a chance to receive community-based job training, substance abuse treatment, family counseling and dozens of other services necessary for making a successful reentry to their own hometowns. Without these programs, many ex-offenders are likely to return to the criminal activities that landed them in prison in the first place.
For more information on incarceration and families, please visit the Justice Fellowship resource page here. |
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