Inmates’ Stock Is Rising in Albany District Fight

Inmates’ Stock Is Rising in Albany District Fight
By JEREMY W. PETERS

ALBANY — As state lawmakers prepare to redraw the boundaries of Congressional and state legislative districts, one segment of the population is quickly becoming a coveted constituency: prisoners.

They do not carry any endorsement influence, promise big-dollar political contributions or even vote (they are barred by law from doing so). But with the balance of power in the State Senate tipping on a single vote, Republicans and Democrats are already squabbling over the home addresses of New York’s 58,378 inmates as they anticipate how the 2010 census will reshape the electoral map.

With New York expected to lose at least one seat in Congress because of population shifts nationwide, and Republicans facing the prospect of being further relegated to the minority if they do not pick up seats in the Senate, the fight promises to be especially fierce.

On Thursday, Democrats announced plans to seek a change that would help them lay claim to a large slice of the prison population, a move that would help them add to their ranks.

Under their proposal, the state would have to count prisoners as residents of their last known address rather than counting them where they are held, a practice that has increased the population of upstate districts, where Republican voters predominate.

Supporters of the change have framed the issue as a way to prevent the disenfranchisement of poor, mostly minority communities.

“The present rule takes people who come from and return to poor or black and Latino communities and transfers their value for reapportionment purposes to rural upstate districts that really have nothing to do with them,” said Senator Eric T. Schneiderman, a Democrat from the Upper West Side of Manhattan who is leading the effort to change the way prisoners are counted.

But Republicans say that aside from depriving upstate districts of representation in the Legislature, the plan would unfairly change the way one group is counted without changing how other transient groups, like university students and military families, are counted.

“This isn’t purely black and white; you need consistency,” said Senator Joseph A. Griffo, a Republican whose North Country district includes four prisons. “To me, until you change everything, you don’t change one specific component.”

If the proposal becomes law, New York would become the first state where prisoners are not considered residents of the district where they are incarcerated for purposes of determining the size of legislative districts. Similar proposals have been introduced recently in Illinois, Wisconsin and at the federal level, but none have become law.

The average time served for an inmate in New York is about 3.6 years. “That’s less time than most college students spend away from home,” said Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat from Brooklyn who is sponsoring the prisoner-counting legislation in the Assembly.

An analysis conducted by the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit group that studies incarceration patterns, found that seven upstate Senate districts would not have met the minimum population requirements if prisoners had been excluded when district lines were last redrawn in 2002. All seven of those districts were held by Republicans; five of them still are.

In all, 44,326 New York City residents were counted as residents of other parts of the state when district lines were last redrawn. Subtracting the 586 prisoners in New York City who were not city residents, the city’s net population loss was 43,740.

The result, the study said, has been an overpopulation of Senate districts in New York City and an underpopulation of districts upstate. The population of districts are supposed to be relatively constant, but the law allows for slight variations. As a result, some Senate districts upstate barely meet the population requirement, while some districts downstate nearly exceed the requirement. Currently, a district’s population must be no more than 5 percent higher or lower than 306,072.

The district represented by Senator Elizabeth O’C. Little, a Republican, is the example most often cited by advocates for changing the law. When the boundaries of her district were drawn in 2002, the Senate included nearly 13,000 prisoners as residents, or about 4 percent of its total population.

Department of Correctional Services data from this month showed that Ms. Little’s district had about 11,000 prisoners, reflecting a statewide trend toward a shrinking prison population.

Ms. Little said in an interview that changing the way prisoners were counted would distort census data. “The purpose of the census is to record who is living where at a given period of time,” she said. “So if you’re in a nursing home at a certain time, you’re going to be counted there even if you’re just there for rehab. If you’re living in a college town while you’re away at a university, you’re going to be counted there. And if you’re in prison you’re going to be counted there.”

Ms. Little added that she viewed the prisoners in her district as her constituents, regardless of how temporary their stays might be. And she noted that they behave like other concerned constituents in one major way: they write. “I have gotten letters from inmates.” [NYT]