The Census Count of Prisoners is Inflating the size of Republican Districts

The electoral implications of how we treat felons have been hotly debated since the 2000 election, when Florida's felon disenfranchisement policies may have helped tip the state to Bush. How the census counts prisoners may seem a marginal concern compared with the disenfranchisement of significant numbers of minority voters. (According to two studies released this week, one in five black men in Rhode Island and one in eight in Georgia are barred from voting due to a prior conviction.) But the prisoner count is more than a mere clerical matter. Census figures are used to draw legislative districts, and, to a lesser degree, to determine the allocation of state and federal funds. As a result, Wagner argues, urban, Democratic districts with high incarceration rates are losing political clout to the rural, Republican districts where prisons are increasingly being built. Across the country most felons are being nominally represented by legislators who not only can safely ignore them - inmates can't vote in 48 states - but whose political fortunes are tied to the growth of the corrections industry. With a national prison population of 1.5 million (plus 700,000 in local jails) and growing, the result, Wagner argues, is a fundamental distortion of the democratic process. [more ]