CENSUS' CELL COUNT STEALS VOTING POWER

With planning for the 2010 census already under way, a question is in
play that will affect future elections: where to count the nation's
exploding prison population?

Since the first census in 1790, prisoners have been counted where
they're locked up, not where they previously lived.

But now that there are close to 1.5 million prisoners nationwide, the
traditional counting method takes voting power away from liberal urban
areas like New York City, where most prisoners come from, and gives it
to conservative rural communities, where most prisons are.

It's time the U.S. Census Bureau gave states the data they need to
reverse this dynamic.

Prisoners are barred from voting in New York and 47 other
states.

But they count for purposes of drawing lines for legislative
districts.

Locating the prisoners in their upstate cells for districting takes
their lack of representation a step further, by reducing the political
power of the communities from which they come.

Take the New York State Senate. In all, 76 percent of the state's
nearly 71,500 prisoners come from New York City and its suburbs.

But more than 90 percent of the inmates are held and counted
upstate.

In that region are seven New York Senate districts with
smaller-than-average populations, thanks to gerrymandering. Each of
the seven districts has a Republican senator.

And each has thousands of prisoners - including almost 9,000 in the
district that includes Attica state prison.

In theory, the Attica prisoners are represented by Sen. Dale Volker
(R-Depew). Yet the former police officer says that he ignores letters
from inmates in order to spend his time on the corrections workers he
sees as his real constituents. As co-chair of the committee that is
reexamining the Rockefeller drug laws, Volker has led the opposition
to reducing sentences for the majority of offenders, stonewalling this
year's reform effort.

Taking the prisoners out of the upstate population count would reduce
the number of legislators like Volker with an incentive to court the
corrections lobby.

Gerrymandering is an art in New York and many other
states.

But if rural districts didn't have prisoners to inflate their
population numbers, some legislative lines would likely have to be
redrawn, since the seven undersized upstate districts already barely
include enough voters to squeak by the constitutional rule of thumb
for apportionment. New lines could shift one Senate seat from upstate
to the New York City area - a move the legislature sidestepped during
the last round of redistricting two years ago.

The same questions about fair allocation of political power apply
throughout the country.

Many states send tens of thousands of inmates from their urban homes
to rural prisons.

With federal prisons expanding twice as fast as state prisons and
unevenly distributed throughout the country, it's increasingly
possible that the current method of counting prisoners could affect
how congressional seats are apportioned among the states in 2010.

The traditional method for counting prisoners isn't the only reason
that urban communities are underrepresented in government: Low voter
turnout, the undercounting of racial minorities and felon
disenfranchisement are also to blame. But the prisoner count is
especially unsavory because it's reminiscent of the practice of
counting slaves as three-fifths of a person that predates the Civil
War. The three-fifths count helped keep black people enslaved by
increasing the size of the South's congressional delegations. Today,
half of the nation's prisoners who are ill-served by the current
census practice are African-American.

The Census Bureau's general rule is to count people where they live
and sleep most of the time. By adding one line - asking prisoners for
their last previous address - the bureau could also present numbers
about the neighborhoods they came from. That's where the parole
department expects the prisoners to go on release.

And it's also where most state constitutions, including New York's,
say that a prisoner's legal residence is.

The bureau can't provide the new data in time to affect the elections
this November. But as the prison population continues to grow,
changing the census will matter even more to the outcome of future
races.