Criminal InJustice Kos: Freeing Prisoners of the Census

Criminal InJustice Kos every Wednesday at 6 pm CST

Freeing Prisoners of the Census
by The Editors, soothsayer99 and RadioGirl

There are many ways to hijack political power. One of them is to draw state or city legislative districts around large prisons — and pretend that the inmates are legitimate constituents.

Which, of course, they are not. Prison inmates are stripped of the right to vote in all but two states. They often live hundreds of miles from the prison town — where they may never even see the local streets. Once released, they are hustled onto buses and driven halfway across the state to their actual homes....

It’s called prison-based gerrymandering. It violates the principle of one person, one vote. And it brings to mind the slave-era United States, when enslaved persons were denied the vote and counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of apportioning representation in Congress.