Host: Peter Wagner, Executive Director, Prison Policy Initiative

Guest:

Dale Ho, Assistant Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense Fund

Recorded: June, 2010, Aired: November 2010

Transcript:

Peter Wagner:

Welcome to issues in prison-based gerrymandering, a podcast about keeping the Census Bureau’s prison count from harming our democracy. The Census Bureau counts people in prison as if they were actual residents of their prison cells, even though most state laws say that people in prison are residents of their homes. When prison counts are used to pad legislative districts, the weight of a vote starts to differ. If you live next to a large prison, your vote is worth more than one cast in a district without prisons. Prison-based gerrymandering distorts state legislative districts and has been known to create county legislative districts that contain more prisoners than voters. On each episode, we’ll talk with different voting rights experts about ways in which state and local governments can change the census and avoid prison-based gerrymandering.

Thank you for joining us, Dale. I was hoping you could introduce yourself and tell us about what you do at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and why the LDF is interested in addressing prison-based gerrymandering.

Dale Ho:

Thanks a lot, Peter. My name’s Dale Ho, and I’m assistant counsel in the political participation group at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. My work focuses on voting rights and election law, and we’re interested in the prison-based gerrymandering issue for a number of reasons.

First, and I think the most basic, reason is prison-based gerrymandering violates the fundamental principle of one person, one vote, the basic principle of political equality that everyone’s vote is supposed to be counted equally. But as we all know, because of prison-based gerrymandering, your vote and my vote doesn’t count as much as the vote of someone who lives in an election district that hosts a prison because the prison population is used to artificially inflate the population count and thus the political influence of those districts. So it’s an issue that really affects everyone.

I want to make that very, very clear because sometimes when the Legal Defense Fund talks about this issue, people think, once we walk into the room, oh this is a minority issue. This is an issue that just deals with communities of color. But I really want to make clear that this is an issue that affects everyone. It affects people regardless of race, and it affects people regardless of geographic region.

Now, all that being said, prison-based gerrymandering does have particularly harsh effects on communities of color, and I think the reason for that is that incarcerated populations are disproportionately people of color. So, take New York State, for an example. In New York State, 30% of the overall population is African American and Latino. But 77%, so, more than two-and-a-half times that rate, of the prison population is African American and Latino, and what prison-based gerrymandering does in New York State is, because the incarcerated population is so overwhelmingly people of color, it basically has the effect of unfairly transferring political power from communities of color to other regions of the state.

Peter Wagner:

Wow, so what kind of progress we have seen on prison-based gerrymandering?

Dale Ho:

We’ve seen tremendous progress. First of all, Maryland, you know, passed its legislation to correct for prison-based gerrymandering,