Brooklyn – Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries celebrated a victory in State Supreme Court late last week that upheld legislation he sponsored that ended prison-based gerrymandering in the state of New York. With the law’s passage, New York became only the second state in the country to count incarcerated individuals in their home communities for purposes of legislative reapportionment.
“I am gratified that the court arrived at the right decision,” said Jeffries. “Last year's historic legislation ended the injustice of prison-based gerrymandering in New York State. For the purpose of redistricting, counting people in their home communities is fair and one of the core tenets of our democracy.”
As a lawmaker, Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman sponsored the legislation in the state senate and worked closely with Jeffries to champion the bill that ensured that the state would count prisoners accurately. Inmate-based gerrymandering – the previous method of counting prisoners – led to a distortion in New York’s system of legislative representation by artificially inflating the political power of rural, upstate counties and hurting urban neighborhoods like those in central Brooklyn.
According to a study by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, 66 percent of the state’s prisoners come from New York City, but 91 percent of them are incarcerated upstate. In the 2000 Census, over 43,000 New York City residents were counted as members of upstate communities because of prison-based gerrymandering.
Allowing communities to take in populations by force just to inflate legislative districts with prisons violates any sense of equal protection or fundamental fairness. It also creates perverse incentives for elected officials to support harsh mandatory minimum sentences, like the now-reformed Rockefeller Drug Laws.
Nine upstate elected officials had challenged the law in State Supreme Court. Albany County Judge Eugene Devine’s decision dismissed the challenge, ruling that there were no grounds to prevent the state from enforcing the new law.
“I congratulate Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and the tireless work of his office to ensure that justice prevailed,” said Jeffries.
Kings County is home to more state prison inmates than any other county in the state. Without prison populations from Brooklyn and other New York City neighborhoods, seven of New York’s state senate districts from the 2000 redistricting cycle would not have met the minimum population requirements under federal law.
Jeffries noted that the judge’s decision was rendered in time for prisoners to be properly counted in their home districts as part of the decennial redistricting process in 2012, which will in turn change district lines across the state.