Today on NPR, David Sommerstein from the Prison Policy Institute–based in nearby Northampton!–talked about prison-based gerrymandering. As with many stories that have been featured in the run-up to the 2010 census, this one has implications beyond simply accounting for the number of people in a given area.
It turns out that prisoners’ legal residences are their prison cell, not where they call home or where they were living before they were convicted. However, since in most cases prisoners can’t vote, the actual voting populations in precincts that host prisons have disproportionate influence. This is because for congressional districts that wouldn’t meet the minimum population requirement except for their prison population, fewer voters are controlling a single representative, giving each voter more pull over the political process than voters in districts that meet the minimum requirement.
The United States has the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world: as of 2008, 1 in 100 Americans was in the penal system. One reason for this is cultural: the prevalence and fear of violent crime and American ethos of individualism and personal responsibility mean that being “tough on crime”–showing zero tolerance for law-breakers and making the penal code ever more punitive–is always a political winner. Since prisoners–and in many states, ex-cons–cannot vote, there is insufficient countervailing electoral influence against these policies by those with a personal stake, which is undemocratic on its own.
Another reason for our high incarceration rate is economic. Prisons are a key source of employment in many areas with few other options, particularly rural areas. This primes the pump for even increasing incarceration rates. As long as there is a net transfer of population to rural areas from urban areas, where most crime happens, the voting power of people in those rural areas will increase relative to prisoners’ urban points of origin. These people will then use this power to support policies that they may already agree with–e.g. mandatory minimum sentencing–but that also happen to correspond with their economic interests. This trend is self-reenforcing: building more prisons will bring more electoral power, which will lead to more prisons, and so forth. In essence, this system incentivizes voters to increase the punitiveness of law enforcement for reasons that have nothing to do with crime prevention or prisoner rehabilitation; in fact, this system has an interest in locking up as many people as possible (despite the fact that the violent crime rate has been falling for decades–see the Prison Policy Initiative’s website for a multitude of data).
Moreover, we are not just talking about individual voters making self-interested decisions. The so-called Prison-Industrial Complex is by some accounts a $50 billion industry, and the companies that run private prisons have every incentive to expand their operations. Like any other industry with an interest in political outcomes, operators of private prisons are able to influence voters and public officials to further their desired outcomes. Here that means more prisoners and more prisons.
The outrageous racial, gender and class inequalities perpetuated by the prison system notwithstanding, this is just one of numerous situations where people have noticed a flaw in the election system and used it to put their thumb on the scale of political power to accomplish ends that benefit them but incur costs on society. Yet, the solution to this electoral loophole would be simple: count prisoners as residents of their own communities, not their prison cells.