A new one on me. Are African - American prisoners sent to serve time in penitentiaries far removed from their home communities in order to deliberately reduce the potential power of those districts - which tend to be black - and increase those of districts where prisons are located - which tend to be white?
African-Americans comprise 12.7 percent of the U.S. population. But
because they make up 41.3 percent of the federal and state prison
population, this type of gerrymandering disproportionately affects black
communities. Prisons are also often located in rural areas —
non-metropolitan America houses 20 percent of the national population,
but 60 percent of new prison construction, according to the report —
further distorting political muscle.
“It is all too reminiscent,” the report says, “of the infamous ‘three-fifths compromise,’
whereby enslaved and disfranchised African Americans were counted to
inflate the number of constituents – and thus, the political influence –
of Southern states before the Civil War.”
