Host: Peter Wagner, Executive Director, Prison Policy Initiative

Guest:

Bruce Riley, organizer at Direct Action for Rights and Equality, Providence Rhode Island

Recorded: June, 2010, Aired: August 2010

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 Bruce Riley, an organizer at DARE in Rhode Island, Direct Action for Rights and Equality. Bruce has been spearheading the campaign to end prison-based gerrymandering in Rhode Island. Welcome, Bruce.

Bruce Reilly:

Hey, how are you?

Peter Wagner:

Very good, how are you?

Bruce Reilly:

I’m good. Glad to be here, trying to help other folks out in their battles and sharing whatever it is that I can share because we all have to work together. Otherwise we’re all left in our own little silos, and it’s not very efficient.

Peter Wagner:

So Rhode Island is a state that is looking very seriously at fixing prison-based gerrymandering. It’s a state that, until recently, this was not on the radar at all, so I was hoping you could tell us about that and what you’ve learned. But first, I was hoping, could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you, about DARE, and about your interest in this issue?

Bruce Reilly:

Sure. I am fortunate enough to work for a non-profit I used to volunteer for and be on the board. I started that work while I was in prison and this is the local group that works with prisoners of Rhode Island on issues systemically. We don’t have any staff lawyers, we don’t work on individual cases, although that gets looped in to working on the system issues. I got out five years ago, was a very active member on the outside, learned so much, brought some of my artistic skills into the organizing and the promo for things, learned a lot about computers as I went, started learning how to make my reports look fancy, and here we are. I happen to have seen at Brown University maybe five years ago one Peter Wagner do a presentation on the prison-based gerrymandering in New York State, and it always lingered in the back of my head. As we got closer to this census, I thought, hey, what’s the Rhode Island situation? How do we count our prisoners? And nobody knew the answer to it. And I was just like, somebody’s got to know. And so I ended up doing a little of my own research and found out that sure, it’s done just the way everybody else does it. I was able to get in touch with yourself and local people that would be interested. I managed to crunch the numbers on our own prison here. Particularly because I was familiar with each building, what the population was, where it was in the districts. I did the math and then I presented it publicly onto a blog that I contribute to, and then the ball started rolling. Here we are.

Peter Wagner:

So for people who have been following prison-based ge...