THE PRISON EFFECT ON POLITICAL LANDSCAPE

DURHAM, N.C. - The US prison boom of the past 30 years - which has
nearly doubled the number of state prisons to more than 1,000 and
increased the nation's prison population from 218,000 to 1.3 million -
has had widely recognized economic, political, and social effects.

But one important political effect of the forced relocation of
millions of inmates has been largely overlooked: The dilution of the
urban black vote to the benefit of rural white communities.

A new Urban Institute report shows that inmates tend to come from
regions that are demographically distinct from those in which their
prisons are located. And because the Census Bureau counts prison
inmates as residents of the legislative districts in which they're
incarcerated, the relocation of inmates - who are not allowed to vote
in 48 states - skews both the distribution of government funds and the
apportionment of legislative representation.

This is a particularly grievous injustice in an era in which
presidential and legislative races are won by razor-thin margins.

The distortion in representation caused by enumeration of prisoners
tends to favor rural residents, whites, and Republicans, at the
expense of urban residents, blacks, and Democrats.

In most states, prisons are disproportionately located in rural areas,
yet most inmates come from urban areas. For example, in four state
house districts in Connecticut, inmates make up more than 10 percent
of the population. Each of these districts has low population and is
disproportionately white - except, of course, for the inmate
populations. And because of the presence of inmates, these districts
effectively get about 10 percent more representation than they ought
to.

Similarly, in Florida, statistics show a correlation between gains in
representation from the presence of prisons and partisan affiliation
of voters. Counties that gain population by importing prison inmates -
and thus increase their congressional and state legislative
representation - tend to vote Republican. Meanwhile, counties that
lose population and legislative representation because a share of
their population is imprisoned in other counties tend to vote Democratic.

Besides affecting representation inside a state, prison location has
the potential to affect congressional apportionment between states.
Wisconsin, for example, contracts to send as many as 10,000 inmates to
prisons in other states. Wisconsin politicians were so concerned that
the state would lose a congressional seat after the 2000 Census
because of this practice that Republican Rep. Mark Green actually
introduced legislation to count those inmates as citizens of
Wisconsin. (In the end, the legislation didn't pass, and the seat was
lost - though because of a larger margin of population loss than the
inmates accounted for.)

This is only the most recent in a long line of techniques for diluting
the voting power of African- Americans. And it's uncomfortably
reminiscent of the infamous "three-gifths compromise." Under that
clause of the Constitution, which determined how representation in the
lower house of Congress would be allocated, slaves were counted as
three-fifths of a person - although, of course, they weren't allowed
to vote. The result was that the presence of disenfranchised blacks in
the South increased the representation of white Southerners in the
House. Likewise, under the current method of counting prison inmates,
the presence of disenfranchised blacks in rural prisons increases the
representation of white, rural, Republican voters both in the House
and in state legislatures.

Not only does counting inmates in the districts in which they're
incarcerated dilute the African-American vote and therefore violate
the Voting Rights Act, it creates unconstitutional inequalities in the
number of constituents per district, a violation of the Fourteenth
Amendment.

Since the "one man, one vote" Supreme Court rulings in the '60s
requiring that legislative boundaries in each state contain equal
populations, the right of each citizen to equal representation in the
House and state legislature has been a cornerstone of American
democracy. The postcensus redistricting is designed to fulfill this
critical goal of ensuring that each legislative district has as close
to an equal number of constituents as possible.

The method of counting inmates where they're imprisoned, and not in
their home districts undermines this doctrine. Even in the eyes of the
legislators whose districts benefit from the presence of inmates,
those inmates are not their constituents. In a survey I conducted of
40 Indiana state legislators, all - Democrat and Republican, with or
without a prison in their district - said that inmates who are
incarcerated in other districts, but who have family members in their
district or lived there prior to incarceration, are more truly their
constituents than inmates from other areas who happen to be
incarcerated in their district.

Thus this is further evidence that counting inmates in the districts
in which they're incarcerated creates an imbalance in the number of
true constituents per district.

The Census Bureau should count prison inmates at their "homes of
record." If the Census Bureau and Congress refuse to act, then the
courts must enforce the Voting Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment
and require a change in enumeration methods.

In an era in which America has the largest prison population in the
world in both relative and absolute terms, the topography of that
population should not be allowed to arbitrarily reshape the political
landscape.

Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman is a president's research fellow at
Duke University.