Host: Peter Wagner, Executive Director, Prison Policy Initiative

Guest: Cindy Boersma, Legislative Director of the ACLU of Maryland

May, 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.

Our guest today is Cindy Boersma, Legislative Director of the ACLU of Maryland. Last month, Maryland made history by being the first state to pass a law requiring the state to adjust the U.S. Census and count incarcerated people at home for state and local redistricting purposes. The ACLU of Maryland played a key role in that effort, and Cindy is here to talk with us about how it all came together.

Welcome, Cindy.

Cindy Boersma:

Thank you, Peter. It’s great to be with you.

Peter Wagner:

Thanks for joining us. I was hoping you could introduce yourself and tell us about what you do at the ACLU and why the ACLU was interested in addressing prison-based gerrymandering.

Cindy Boersma:

Some of the people who came out to testify and show their support for ending prison-based gerrymandering at a March 4, 2010 hearing at the Maryland House of Delegates. Cindy Boersma is in the center in the green suit.

I’m the Legislative Director for the ACLU of Maryland. I work primarily on state, our state legislative agenda. We do some work with our Washington legislative office on federal issues. But my primary work is in Annapolis on state legislative issues of concern to the ACLU of Maryland. We became involved in this issue because of our historic involvement in voting rights issues throughout Maryland with some significant history on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

The Eastern Shore has a legacy dating back, of course, to slavery with a significant black population and starkly white government at both the state and local level. In many areas, on the Eastern Shore and in other parts of Maryland, there has been no African American who has ever held elected office or even held a professional position in state or local government. That led to Voting Rights Act litigation by the ACLU in partnership with the NAACP back in the ’80s around the state and also on the Eastern Shore.

In response to that litigation, the court created a majority-minority district in one county’s local election districts in Somerset County and yet the problem of no African Americans holding elected offices or even hired positions–professional positions–in local government persisted.

We, again with the NAACP, documented the persistence of that problem in a report that we issued last summer. One of the sources of the problem, not the only source, but one significant contribution to the problem was that sitting in the middle of this majority-minority district was one of the state’s large prisons, so that 64% of what was the majority-minority in that district were prisoners at the Eastern Correctional Institution.