I've mentioned it before but Ruth Wilson Gilmore points out that prisons form a system of rural jobs programs. Tying together the 1980s farm crisis and the rise in incarceration
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
The prisons also counted all the people in them as residents, for apportionment of votes, money, and so on.
You would have a rural county where 6,000 people, including 1,500 prison guards, actually live. And then 6,000 prisoners.
Which would count as 12,000 people in terms of congressional and state representation. But only half of them are actually allowed to vote.
This is known as prison gerrymandering, although in New York it was made illegal in 2010[0].
However, it's still legal in many other states[1].
They should be able to vote though
Racism was the historic angle-- but even if you target a black community and make felons of all the men, they would only comprise a minority of voters in a white district, and it just reduces the number of all eligible voters in an all-black district. Is this a local politics thing (school funding, etc.)?
Or is it just a way to suppress voting by as much of the Left as possible?
The Right are the ones who define all these laws. The Left are the ones who seem positioned to run afoul of them (pro-drugs, pro-abortion, pro-prostitution, etc.), then lose their ability to influence change.
Reducing the number of voters by eliminating a disfavored class from representation while retaining the political power of apportionment that counts the disebfranchised citizens was the whole point of the 3/5 compromise, and mass criminalization plus felon disenfranchisement is its direct replacement.
Also, you maybe want to consider the effect on a mixed-race district where, say, a sufficient minority of whites are sympathetic to black interests that together they would, before selective disenfrnachisement, constitute a majority.
> Is this a local politics thing (school funding, etc.)?
That, too, but its largely a federal politics thing.
Thanks-- I [think I] see where you're going but still don't get where this ends. You have a district with a minority of people who can't vote. Yet they are counted among the population.
This directly suppresses presidential votes, but what besides the House benefits from an inflated population of non-voters?
> you maybe want to consider the effect on a mixed-race district where, say, a sufficient minority of whites are sympathetic to black interests that together they would, before selective disenfrnachisement, constitute a majority.
The thought crossed my mind, but the only example I'm familiar with is Atlanta-- a few blue droplets on a red ocean, yet the state is currently represented by two Democratic senators, and the House is split. There's something weird about this but I'm not a political strategist enough to understand what's going on here. Is this where population matters-- density of the metro area outweighing the rest of the state?
Presidential voting power (for the same reason as the House; well, really, as a direct consequence of apportionment of the House).
Yes, Atlanta metro is about 60% of the population of the state of Georgia.
This is egregious.
Snark aside, this is how you systematically disenfranchise minorities. See Florida.
Democracy doesn’t mean only the “deserving” get a vote. In theory.
Making the slave labor illegal wouldn't get rid of most of the economic/political incentive for prisons.