Look, I know I've said this before, but Gov. David Paterson is leaving an incomparable progressive legacy on corrections issues in New York. The budget passed by the state Legislature yesterday would end the practice of prison-based gerrymandering, by which conservative upstate politicians inflate their power by counting the largely black prison population as constituents despite the fact that inmates, by definition, reside in the district involuntarily.
Whatever else can be said about Paterson's term, the man reformed the draconian Rockefeller drug laws, outlawed the NYPD's stop-and-frisk database, and is poised to end the state's use of a terrible political practice reminiscent of the three-fifths compromise. That's really something.
