Census Count of Prison Inmates Distorts Democracy
By: Gerri L. Elder
A backhoe operator for Jones County in Eastern Iowa was elected to the Anamosa City Council after receiving exactly two votes. Both votes were write-ins, reportedly by his wife and a neighbor.
The Census Bureau says that Danny R. Young's ward has approximately the same population as the three other wards in the city. Although there are roughly 1,400 people in each ward, the votes for Young carried about 25 times more weight than voters in other wards.
On the surface, this makes no sense. It is only when you consider that Young's ward includes the 1,300 inmates housed at Iowa's largest penitentiary that his win with only two votes can be understood.
None of the 1,300 inmates in Young's ward can vote. Only 58 of the residents of Ward 2 are not incarcerated. So, as a result of his wife and neighbor's political clout, Young won the election by a landslide.
The fact that Young was elected to the City Council with two write-in votes has made Anamosa the poster child for a national campaign to change the way the Census Bureau counts prison inmates.
The New York Times reported that Young has said that since the prison inmates do not vote, he doesn't really consider him his constituents.
Concerns about similar voting disparities have also come up in upstate New York, Tennessee and Wisconsin. It is being called prison-based gerrymandering and is becoming a growing issue as the number of incarcerated people continues to grow.
Gerrymandering is a term used to describe the deliberate arrangement of boundaries in order to influence the outcome of an election. Critics say that the Census Bureau should count inmates in the voting district where they lived prior to going to prison.
Peter Wagner is the executive director of the Prison Policy Initiative. His advocacy group favors alternatives to prison sentences and urges that inmates be counted in their hometowns. Wagner says that although the Census Bureau may count prisoners in the wrong districts, but democracy does not necessarily have to suffer as a result of census figures.
Two years ago, experts commissioned by the Census Bureau recommended that the agency conduct a study into whether prison inmates should be counted in 2010 as residents of the neighborhoods where they previously lived, rather than as residents of the districts where they are incarcerated. Changes in the census counting procedures would likely require the approval of Congress.
Wagner told the New York Times that with only one exception nationwide, each time that a community has learned that prison populations have distorted the voting process and their access to local government, the legislature has reversed the course and redrawn district boundaries to fairly reflect the actual population.
In Anamosa, 76-year-old retired writer and court clerk Bertha Finn was instrumental in organizing a referendum last year to allow for the election of council members at large, rather than from wards. The city administration says that the change will take effect in November 2009.
Young says he is undecided about whether or not he will seek re-election.