Counting prisoners in redistricting could distort voting in Barbour County

With redistricting on the horizon, Barbour County is facing a predicament regarding its two prisons.

Easterling and Ventress correctional facilities, located near Clio and Clayton, respectively, are counted in the official U.S. Census population numbers as part of the county.

Those Census numbers are, in turn, used to create the county districts, which are designed by law to consist of roughly equal numbers of people.

Since prisoners are unable to vote and aren’t permanent residents of the county in which a prison resides, those numbers can offset the balance of voting power in a county and create what the Prison Policy Institute calls “prison-based gerrymandering.”

“The problem is they’re not legal residents of the county under Alabama law,” said Peter Wagner, executive director of the Massachusetts-based non-profit organization. “Every decade the Supreme Court requires governments to update their districts based on population, but the data most everyone uses has a systematic flaw in that it counts people in the wrong place. You’re potentially looking at two county commission districts that could be 25 percent prisoners who can’t vote. In other words, every two people represented in those districts could be counted like four people elsewhere.”

According to Wagner, more than 100 counties across the nation have taken action to remove the prison populations from their counts for redistricting purposes.

Instead, the prisoners are counted in their actual home county, which Wagner said helps fix the problem.

Barbour County Commission Chairman Earl Gilmore said the prison counts were included in the 2000 redistricting and he’s heard no complaints about the current system.

“I don’t see that we’ve ever had a problem,” Gilmore said. “I haven’t heard any commissioners talking about doing anything about it. What (we’re) gonna do is what we get from (the Census).”

Wagner said he sent letters to each of the Barbour County commissioners explaining the situation.

“It means, if you live in a non-prison district, you have less access to government than you should,” he said. “Other people have more access. Commissioners in those districts have less people to be responsive to. A lot of counties included the prisons in their districts because they didn’t know the prisons were counted or didn’t know it was legally or technically possible to remove them. There’s entirely an innocent reason if the districts were drawn this way 10 years ago, but now the counties know. They want to be aware when they’re drawing those districts that the Census is not necessarily voters, so they can be sure a district drawn in a certain way can perform the way they intend it to.”

Wagner said there is no federal law requiring governments to use Census data for redistricting, and State Sen. Billy Beasley, D-Clayton, said the issue must be examined.

“It has broad ramifications,” Beasley said. “I think there probably needs to be a commission created, and it’s an issue that needs to be studied. I think the makeup (of the commission) needs to be based on the diversity of the state and needs to be a broad-based commission, but that may be the appropriate step.”

The Census will release a report in early May that will help counties and states identify prison populations.