Prisoners of the Census: Electoral and Financial Consequences of Counting Prisoners Where They Go, Not Where They Come From

Abstract

* This research was supported by grants from the Soros Justice Fellowship Program of the Open Society Institute. † Eric Lotke is Director of Research and Policy at the Justice Policy Institute. He performed this research as a Soros Senior Justice Fellow. Previously, he was the Executive Director of the D.C. Prisoners Legal Services Project, a judicial clerk on the Supreme Court of Connecticut, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown and George Washington Law Schools. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University and of the University of Wisconsin. ‡ Peter Wagner, JD, is a Soros Justice Fellow and Assistant Director of the Prison Policy Initiative, a widely-used internet project providing accurate, timely research and policy reports on criminal justice issues. He is the author of Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York, the first systematic state analysis of the impact of prisoner enumeration policies on legislative redistricting. As part of his Soros Justice Fellowship, he is currently measuring the impact of prisoner enumeration on legislative redistricting in a number of states and publishing the results on the project’s website, PrisonersoftheCensus.org. 1. BUREAU OF JUSTICE STATISTICS, U.S. DEP’T OF JUSTICE, BULL. NO. NCJ 200248, PRISONERS IN 2002 1 (2003), available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/ pdf/p02.pdf [hereinafter PRISONERS IN 2002]. 2. See BUREAU OF JUSTICE STATISTICS, U.S. DEP’T OF JUSTICE, BULL. NO. NCJ 175688, WOMEN OFFENDERS 8 tbl.18 (1999), available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/ bjs/pub/pdf/wo.pdf; see also BUREAU OF JUSTICE STATISTICS, U.S. DEP’T OF JUSTICE, BULL. NO. NCJ 182335, INCARCERATED PARENTS AND THEIR CHILDREN (2000), available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/iptc.pdf. 3. See, e.g., Todd Clear, The Problem with “Addition by Subtraction”, in INVISI-