The U.S. Census Bureau’s handling of prison inmates has become one more battlefield in the endless skirmish for partisan advantage.
In this Thursday, Nov. 14, 2019 photo, Jerome Dillard poses in Milwaukee. Dillard, a former inmate who is now the state director of Milwaukee-based advocacy group Ex-incarcerated People Organizing, supports ending prison gerrymandering. A longstanding U.S. Census Bureau policy for counting inmates as prison residents means a significant portion of Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods will be undercounted because their incarceration rates are among the highest in the nation.
Democrats argue the system shifts resources from traditionally liberal urban centers — home to many inmates who are disproportionately black and Hispanic — to rural, white, Republican-leaning areas where prisons are usually located. Although the Census Bureau has counted inmates as prison residents since 1850, states control redistricting and can move those populations to their home counties for that purpose or not include inmates at all when maps are drawn. Some states controlled by Democrats are passing laws to prohibit using prison populations to draw legislative maps.
“The rural counties benefit tremendously off of the back of individuals who are incarcerated in those regions,” said Jerome Dillard, the state director of Ex-incarcerated People Organizing, a Milwaukee-based advocacy group that, among other things, wants to restore voting rights to former prisoners. Wisconsin state prisons confined about 23,500 black men as of August, including 7,800 from Milwaukee — a Democratic stronghold.
But Shope, the Arizona lawmaker, compared counting inmates as part of legislative districts to counting people in the country illegally.
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