The prison effect on political landscape

The US prison boom of the past 30 years - which has nearly doubled the number of state prisons to more than 1,000 and increased the nation's prison population from 218,000 to 1.3 million - has had widely recognized economic, political, and social effects.

But one important political effect of the forced relocation of millions of inmates has been largely overlooked: The dilution of the urban black vote to the benefit of rural white communities.

A new Urban Institute report shows that inmates tend to come from regions that are demographically distinct from those in which their prisons are located. And because the Census Bureau counts prison inmates as residents of the legislative districts in which they're incarcerated, the relocation of inmates - who are not allowed to vote in 48 states - skews both the distribution of government funds and the apportionment of legislative representation.

This is a particularly grievous injustice in an era in which presidential and legislative races are won by razor-thin margins.

The distortion in representation caused by enumeration of prisoners tends to favor rural residents, whites, and Republicans, at the expense of urban residents, blacks, and Democrats.

In most states, prisons are disproportionately located in rural areas, yet most inmates come from urban areas. For example, in four state house districts in Connecticut, inmates make up more than 10 percent of the population. Each of these districts has low population and is disproportionately white - except, of course, for the inmate populations. And because of the presence of inmates, these districts effectively get about 10 percent more representation than they ought to.

Similarly, in Florida, statistics show a correlation between gains in representation from the presence of prisons and partisan affiliation of voters. Counties that gain population by importing prison inmates - and thus increase their congressional and state legislative representation - tend to vote Republican. Meanwhile, counties that lose population and legislative representation because a share of their population is imprisoned in other counties tend to vote Democratic.

Besides affecting representation inside a state, prison location has the potential to affect congressional apportionment between states. Wisconsin, for example, contracts to send as many as 10,000 inmates to prisons in other states. Wisconsin politicians were so concerned that the state would lose a congressional seat after the 2000 Census because of this practice that Republican Rep. Mark Green actually introduced legislation to count those inmates as citizens of Wisconsin. (In the end, the legislation didn't pass, and the seat was lost - though because of a larger margin of population loss than the inmates accounted for.)

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