This week, Rhode Island could become the 13th state in the country to eliminate the harmful practice of prison gerrymandering.
Prison gerrymandering is the unjust counting of people as residents of prisons, rather than of their home addresses, for the purposes of redistricting. The practice inflates the voting power of white communities that house prisons at the expense of Black, brown, and other communities of color and has been in effect for decades.
With a single vote, members of the state’s Special Committee on Reapportionment can end this discriminatory practice so that every Rhode Islander has a voice in our government and the major decisions that impact our daily lives. We urge state leaders to follow the lead of 12 other states and hundreds of municipalities and eliminate this practice that distorts our democracy and strips us of fair representation.
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Recently, state leaders announced a special hearing on prison gerrymandering in response to the growing movement for reform. To date, more than 22 statewide organizations, including Common Cause Rhode Island and the Formerly Incarcerated Union, have advocated in favor of ending prison gerrymandering. Community members and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have testified publicly in support of ending the practice.
It’s important that state leaders act quickly on this issue so that population numbers can be corrected in time for this year’s drawing of new district maps. Failure to enact reform will mean that a policy of racial and electoral injustice will continue for at least another decade.
Prison gerrymandering disproportionately impacts low-income, Black, and brown communities. Black Rhode Islanders are incarcerated at a rate nine times higher than white Rhode Islanders, and Latino Rhode Islanders are incarcerated at a rate three times higher than white Rhode Islanders. That alone is reason enough for Rhode Island’s Commission on Reapportionment to address the issue, but there are other reasons as well.
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Because the Adult Correctional Institutions (ACI) is the state’s only prison complex, the districts that encompass the campus (House Districts 15 and 20 and Senate Districts 27 and 31) are particularly distorted. In the case of House District 20, fully 15 percent of the population is housed in the ACI. That unnecessarily, and unfairly, diminishes the voting power of the 109 other House and Senate districts in Rhode Island.
In addition, reassigning incarcerated people who were counted at the ACI on April 1, 2020, also is in alignment with state law, which clearly states that a person’s place of residence for voting purposes doesn’t change because of “confinement in a correctional facility.” In other words, implementing prison gerrymandering in Rhode Island violates state law.
Additionally, a significant portion of those who were counted at the ACI were being held in pretrial detention or serving a misdemeanor sentence and were entitled to vote from their home district, not a prison in Cranston. That is also where, after being released, they will be voting from in the next decade. Even the people with felony convictions counted at the ACI also will likely be returning to their home districts when the new district maps from this year’s redistricting cycle go into effect. Designating all of these individuals as Cranston residents for the next 10 years, even though their homes are miles away, is simply untenable.
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Rhode Island is capable of making this change now and following in the footsteps of 12 other states, including Pennsylvania, which reassigned more than 27,000 incarcerated people in just a matter of days after a vote by its redistricting commissions. The Census Bureau also has taken steps to make it easier for states to reallocate people incarcerated, so there is no reason to believe this cannot be done before Rhode Island completes the current redistricting process.
Because no funding formulas are tied to the data file used to draw the new district maps, reassigning those held at the ACI will not affect money flowing to Cranston, or any of the other 38 cities and towns in Rhode Island.
As a matter of fundamental fairness and electoral justice, Election Data Services must amend the redistricting data file to reassign incarcerated people at the ACI during the 2020 census to their home addresses before drawing new legislative districts for Rhode Island.
We hope state leaders don’t miss this once-in-a-decade opportunity to provide fair representation and an equal voice to everyone in Rhode Island.
John Marion is the executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island. Cherie Cruz is the cofounder of the Formerly Incarcerated Union of RI.