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The Census: Phantom Constituents

By Real Cost of Prisons Project (The Sentencing Project)

February 6, 2009, 5:55 pm The Census: Phantom Constituents By Brent Staples http://theboard.blogs.nytimes.com/ 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. Why, then, does the census bureau count inmates as ?residents? of their prisons? Force of habit, maybe. But it is way past time to bring the practice to an end...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog on February 07, 2009 (boomark / email).