Congratulations, Minnesota, On Becoming The Latest State To End Prison Gerrymandering!
'Prison gerrymandering' is affirmative action voting for white, rural Republicans.
You know, conservatives like to throw a lot of tantrums over things they barely understand, like DEI and affirmative action, that are meant to help those who frequently experience discrimination. They are less upset about programs that give them a leg up.
For instance, we basically arrange the whole country and most states to give them an absurdly outsized advantage in elections relative to their population size. They’ve convinced themselves that this isn’t some kind of electoral affirmative action, but rather a simple fact of life that the votes of people who live in rural areas should obviously count more than those who live in urban areas, even if there are many times more of us. It’s just what’s fair. Obviously.
One major example of this is prison gerrymandering — which occurs because the Census counts prisoners as residents of the district where their prison is located instead of where they would normally live under other circumstances. Earlier this month, after 14 years of intense deliberation, Governor Tim Walz signed legislation making Minnesota the 19th state to end this practice and to instead count incarcerated people as residents of their own home addresses. What a concept!
It’s quite the scam. Most of the prison populations come from more urban areas, as this is where most of the people live, but when those people get moved to prisons in rural areas, they are counted in the Census as part of the population of the rural area. Prisoners are not allowed to vote — except in Maine and Vermont — so this then gives prison districts more influence than they ought to in the state legislature, while diluting the power of major population centers. This then incentivizes these areas to want to keep a whole lot of people in prisons, in order to hold on to their power.
It’s basically the same deal as the Three-Fifths Compromise, in which enslaved people were counted as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of the Census, in order to give rural areas more voting power so that they could continue to vote to keep slavery legal.
“This is important because most incarcerated people do not reside in the community where the prison is located, and once released, will return to the place from where they were a resident,” Rep. Esther Agbaje (DFL-Minneapolis) explained when she introduced the bill back in March.
Ironically, as the Prison Policy Initiative explains, this practice can hurt rural communities as well.
In many rural county and city governments, substantial portions of individual districts consist of incarcerated people, not actual residents. In a number of places, we've found elected officials who owe a majority of their clout to prison populations.
One of those places was the small city of Anamosa, Iowa, which became a national symbol of prison-based gerrymandering when a city council incumbent retired, no one ran for office and Danny R. Young was elected with two write-in votes. A large state penitentiary means that Ward 2 had just a handful of city residents, compared to about 1,400 in each of the other 3 wards. The actual population (without the padding of the incarcerated population) of Councilman Young's district was 58, giving his constituents about 25 times as much clout as those in the other wards.
Whoops! Now, they fixed that by eliminating the prison district, but unfortunately did not just go ahead and eliminate the practice altogether.
That being said, we’re definitely on something of a roll with these laws, which have been increasingly proposed and enacted in various states and districts over the past 15 years. It helps that more people are finding out about this and how obviously unfair it is, although naturally, in most cases, Republicans have pushed back because they see no reason to end something that is working so well for them.
Perhaps someday we can put an end to all affirmative action for white, rural Republican voters (like the Electoral College, maybe?) and finally have a government that actually represents most of the people who live here.
PREVIOUSLY:
Not long after NY ended prison gerrymandering, we had a double Dem supermajority in the lege.
Aaaagh, that prison just outside of St. Cloud! I remember when I was a kid (probably about 4-6 years old) when we'd pass it on our way to or from Minneapolis to see my grandparents, my dad would point it out and say (mainly to my younger brother), "See that place? That's where all the bad boys end up when they get older." My brother just turned 60 and he says the place still makes him shudder when he drives past it.