One Person, One Vote by Nick Seabrook

Author:Nick Seabrook [Seabrook, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

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Why has there not been a concerted legal effort to end prison gerrymandering? After all, the same “one person, one vote” arguments that proved so successful at the Supreme Court in the 1960s are equally applicable to the malapportionment of districts created by the misallocation of prisoners. And the disproportionate burden that prison gerrymandering places on racial minority groups might also lend itself to a challenge under the Voting Rights Act.

Part of the explanation must surely lie in the fact that for most of U.S. history—until the War on Drugs and subsequent profusion of mandatory minimum sentences created the mass incarceration crisis of today—prison gerrymandering wasn’t really that big of a problem. And when it did become one, things happened slowly, like the proverbial frog crouching unsuspectingly in a pot of water on the stove, gradually being brought to a boil. But the truth is that prison gerrymandering also represents the largely ignored and forgotten stepchild of the gerrymander family. It lacks the wildly contorted and misshapen districts that can be easily satirized in the pages of the popular press, and the backing of moneyed interests and aggrieved politically connected plaintiffs that might provide the impetus to spur on litigation. And on the political side, both mass incarceration and prisoner disenfranchisement have to date been largely bipartisan problems, lending neither side much incentive to rock the boat by pushing for reform. But creepingly, agonizingly slowly, things have finally begun to change.

The first big push to end prison gerrymandering came in New York. The charge was led by the Prison Policy Initiative, whose very first published report in their Prison Gerrymandering Project series, released in 2002, had focused on the state. They partnered with the National Voting Rights Institute and Demos, the New York City–based progressive think tank, to file an amicus brief in a 2005 case that was pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

In that litigation, Jalil Abdul Muntaqim, who had been convicted of the 1971 murder of two New York City police officers and was serving a life sentence, attempted to mount a vote dilution challenge under the VRA to the state’s felon disenfranchisement laws. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed for lack of standing. Muntaqim was unable to convince the court that the proximate cause of his inability to register to vote was actually the state’s policy toward convicted felons, rather than his lack of residency there (he had previously resided in California and expressed an intent to live with family in Georgia if paroled). But this was still the very first case where arguments against prison gerrymandering had been raised before a federal appellate court.

The lawsuit caught the interest of the New York state senator Eric Schneiderman, who that same year introduced a bill proposing to count incarcerated persons at their home addresses for the purposes of redistricting after the 2010 census. Though his bill stalled in committee, momentum was now gradually beginning to build behind the cause. Similar proposals were introduced in Illinois and Texas, again without success.

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