Research on the crime control industry
Prisonsucks.com is a clearinghouse for useful, verifiable statistics about the crime control industry. Too often prison activists use statistics that are out of date, provided without citation or simply wrong. One of these days the public will start listening to prison activists, so let's be prepared to win without being sidetracked by arguments over defective statistics. In some cases, the numbers we need don't exist. In others, the facts exist but activists don't know where to find them. Now you do.
March 2002
Counting urban prisoners as rural residents skews democratic decision making on crime policy
March 12, 2002
Newhouse News Service just wrote a great article about an upcoming report from our sponsor, the Prison Policy Initiative. The article is about the effect of counting urban prisoners as rural residents for the purposes of distributing state legislative power.
"'Allowing white, rural districts to claim urban black prisoners as residents for purposes of representation resembles the old three-fifths clause (of the Constitution) that allowed the South extra representation for its slaves -- extra representation that kept the North from abolishing slavery long before the Civil War,' said Peter Wagner, who has researched the issue as a law student at Western New England College in Springfield, Mass., and as a founder of the Prison Policy Initiative. The initiative analyzes prison issues and advocates reforms."
"Wagner contends that just as important as the shift of power out of New York's urban districts is the shift upstate toward policies that perpetuate prisons and large inmate populations."
Read the whole article for more....
Minority Prison Inmates Skew Local Populations as States Redistrict