thread on the report I wrote about prison gerrymandering + why it’s the 3/5ths compromise + a love letter to Michelle Alexander.

i wrote the report using the framework Michelle Alexander uses for The New Jim Crow. in her view, mass incarceration is a repackaging of the racial caste system. In a ‘post racial’ post 60s America, Jim Crow laws just don’t fly because it’s not politically or culturally ok

to discriminate against black and brown people in clear ways. But it’s perfectly ok to discriminate against ‘criminals’ in all the ways the US discriminated against black people - we can take away their employment, housing, jobs, public benefits and their right to vote.

so the way to easily continue discriminating against BIPOC is by branding them criminals. in this way, mass incarceration fits into the long line of the subjugation and disenfranchisement of black peoples - but we know this.

anyways we also all know about the three-fifths compromise - northern + southern delegates were debating about how/whether enslaved people should be counted + and came to the conclusion that they should, as 3/5ths of a person.

this was formally struck down and the Supreme Court ruled that each person should have one vote- which is why the census does its thing, so it can count where people are and help legislators draw up districts and provide funding.

but there is a major problem to this - people who can’t vote are counted in the census; so the district they are in gets more power while having less people. And this is especially bad for incarcerated people

because not only can they not vote, they’re counted at their regular residence - they’re counted at their prison. this means that the community they’re in gets more votes, and more representatives, at the expense of the communities they come from.

This is prison gerrymandering - the process of giving communities political clout on the backs of incarcerated people.

so this is effectively the 3/5ths compromise, all over again. prisons are overwhelmingly built in rural white communities, so this amplifies their voices over the voices of often urban, black communities.

like in Illinois, 60% of the incarcerated population is from cook county (Chicago); but 99% is incarcerated down state (got this stat from prison policy initiative)

after reading that, I pulled census data on two Illinois counties - brown and johnson- to illustrate the problem a little more. maps not attached because they’re not cute lol.

I chose these counties because they’re rural, mostly white counties with more than 95% of the black people who live there being incarcerated. In 2010, brown had 13/1280 non-incarcerated black people and Johnson had 36/1006.

29.7% of brown county is incarcerated. 12.2% of Johnson county is incarcerated. This is p horrifying proof that democracy in this country is fake and that black people are seen as nothing but bodies. Many rural communities fight hard to have prisons built in their backyards

most obviously for the labor power - post the manafacturing decline, a lot of communities rebuilt themselves by using prison as a growth strategy. black people are stripped of their agency - the place that incarcerates them has use of them as laborers and nothing else.

once again I’m plugging prison abolition; because that’s the only real answer. But a lot of people have been doing the work to fight this - specifically @PrisonPolicy, with all the lobbying, research and work that they’ve done to end prison gerrymandering.

If u want to see whether your state has outlawed prison gerrymandering or see what can be done, check out their website: https://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/