The Critical Analysis

Prison-based Gerrymandering for Political Votes The other co-founder of LAProgressice.com is Sharon Kyles, Dick Price’s wife. She asked Michelle Alexander how prison-based gerrymandering impacts the country. Alexander calls this scheme a “modern-day 3/5ths Compromise.” Let me clarify two points before we start her discussion. 1) Gerrymandering means manipulating votes to benefit one political side. 2) The 3/5ths Compromise was adopted by the U.S. Constitution in 1787. It was a concession to Northern states to count slaves as 3/5ths of a person as they had fewer slaves there, compared to the South. If you’ll recall in my introduction, the Rev. Jesse Jackson mentioned how “offensive, appalling and insensitive” it is for blacks to be considered three-fifths human. He was referring to the 3/5ths Compromise, which was abolished eighty years later in 1868. Alexander explains: “urban communities, particularly urban communities of color stand to lose the most. Census figures help determine where government money will go to fund hospitals, school services, public housing, social services, food stamps and other programs. The census figures are also used to determine how many seats each state has in the U.S. House of Representatives.” Sharon Kyles cites a NAACP Defense Fund report noting that although rural areas have 20 percent of America’s population, they host 60 percent of new prisons. This came about in the last three decades, from 1980-2010, in coinciding with the anomalous trend of disproportionately more black men placed behind bars in rural prisons. Moreover, census rules require prisoners to be counted where they’re incarcerated, as opposed to counting them on their home turf. With black offenders typically from urban areas, but imprisoned in rural areas, a shift in population count from metropolitan areas to rural areas happens. However, this new demographic trend isn’t truly representative of the indigenous rural constituents—especially when voting districts are redrawn to reflect larger white populations with help from black incarceration. Therefore, prison-based gerrymandering may result in the loss of both federal dollars and political representation for districts that are already struggling. Kyles points out, “Tracy Huling and the Prison Policy Initiative have done a fantastic job researching this topic. Tracy included in one of her papers the following quote, ‘As former New York State legislator Daniel Feldman observed, “When legislators cry ‘Lock ‘em up!’ they often mean, ‘Lock ‘em up in my district!’” It’s not surprising that enslavement has held minorities captive to the whims of the majority. But what’s surprising is how they continue operating legally, but under different disguises in America. And it’s not only blacks who are ashamed and saddened. Michelle Alexander’s book complements a PBS-TV documentary by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Douglas B. Blackmon. Slavery by Another Name Douglas B. Blackmon is white. His book, Slavery by Another Name (2007) won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009. He made a documentary with the same title for PBS-TV aired on February 13, 2012. While a Wall Street Journal reporter, he was intrigued whether black enslavement had been used to further the interests of white corporations. Here’s a previously undocumented account from Blackmon’s book on his website : My guide that day in the summer of 2000 was an industrial archaeologist named Jack Bergstresser. Years earlier, he had stumbled across a simple iron fence surrounding a single collapsed grave during a survey of the area. Bergstresser was mystified by its presence at the center of what at the beginning of the twentieth century was one of the busiest confluences of industrial activity in the United States. The grave and the twisted wrought iron around it sat near what had been the intersection of two rail lines and a complex of mines, coal processing facilities, and furnaces in which thousands of men operated around the clock to generate millions of tons of coal and iron—all owned and operated by U.S. Steel at the height of its supremacy in American commerce. Bergstresser, who is white, told me he wondered if the dead here were forced laborers. He knew that African Americans had been compelled to work in Alabama mines prior to the Great Depression. His grandfather, once a coal miner himself, had told him stories of a similar burial field near the family home place south of Birmingham. … The camp had supplied tens of thousands of men over five decades to a succession of prison mines ultimately purchased by U.S. Steel in 1907. Hundreds of them had not survived. Nearly all were black men arrested and then “leased” by state and county governments to U.S. Steel or the companies it had acquired. Here and in scores of other similarly crude graveyards, the final chapter of American slavery had been buried. It was a form of bondage distinctly different from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless slavery—a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion. How did thousands of black men end up in prison during the Great Depression? With so many men being jobless, they hung out—and were booked into prison for “vagrancy.” Fallout from Incarceration Even after completing their prison sentences, inmates become forever—socially, economically and politically—outcasts for the rest of their lives. They are: • Disenfranchised by being forbidden to vote—notwithstanding having unwittingly contributed to gerrymandering with redrawing districts. As Sophia Kerby points out, this law disproportionately disqualifies men of color their right to vote—about 5.3 million men. This translates to 13 percent of the black male vote. • Automatically excluded from juries. • Legally discriminated against by employers, public housing, bank loans, education and other benefits. Sophia Kerby cites a 2011 university study on “Race, Incarceration and Wage Growth” showing black wage increases post-prison grew 21 percent slower for blacks than for white ex-convicts. Alexander points out people don’t realize slavery still exists in prisons today—as sad a fact as more black men incarcerated post-emancipation than during slavery. Because of the “war on drugs” targeting communities of color (although studies show whites use and sell drugs at rates equal to or higher than blacks), one in three black men end up in prison.