One of the more insidious ways rural districts that contain prisons increase their clout is by counting the involuntary presence of convicted prisoners inhabiting the correctional facilities in their districts as constituents. This would make sense only in Maine or Vermont, where inmates are allowed to vote from prison. Instead, these politicians literally have a captive constituency that is entirely prohibited from actually participating in democracy. It's a reprehensible practice, reminiscent of the "Three-Fifths Compromise" that counted non-voting slaves as three-fifths of human beings for the purpose of drawing congressional districts and distributing taxes prior to the Civil War.
Given the racial composition of the prison population, the eerie parallels between today's prisoner-based gerrymandering and yesterday's slave-counting continue. Namely, that you have a large -- and largely black -- disenfranchised population that is counted for the purpose of helping politicians secure power but prohibited from participating in any way in the selection of those politicians.
Maryland is now poised to become the first state to mandate that prisoners be counted as being residents of the same district as their home address, rather than where they are incarcerated. A similar bill is underway in New York, but Republicans are fighting it because it would give Democrats more power in the state Senate. The Republican response is to bring up military families and college students:
But Republicans say that aside from depriving upstate districts of representation in the Legislature, the plan would unfairly change the way one group is counted without changing how other transient groups, like university students and military families, are counted.I hate to state the obvious here, but prisoners are being involuntarily moved as a result of their being convicted of a crime, while students and military families have voluntarily changed locations.
Look, the proper thing, in my view, is to allow prisoners to vote, as they do in Maine and Vermont. Counting people who are unable to vote from their home address strikes me as only slightly fairer than counting them from where they are incarcerated. I see the reasoning behind removing the right to vote during incarceration, but if people literally can't vote it's not really fair to count them as a constituent, and not counting them isn't a viable alternative either. There also isn't any real civic benefit from felony disenfranchisement -- it doesn't deter crime, it's a purely punitive measure that uses criminal liability as an excuse to take away the votes of people who don't have much of a political voice anyway.
It's sadly not surprising to me that the two states where prisoners are allowed to vote also happen to be two very white New England states where there aren't a lot of black people, so the gravity of the injustice isn't softened by the fact that it's Those People being disenfranchised.
-- A. Serwer
