http://www.pewforum.org/Social-Welfare/prison-chaplains-exec.aspx

http://www.pewforum.org/Social-Welfare/prison-chaplains-exec.aspx

http://articles.cnn.com/2011-09-11/politics/florida.hispanic.voters_1_tea-party-michele-bachmann-hispanics?_s=PM:POLITICS

by Peter Wagner

This article was prepared on Monday. On Wednesday, the Assembly passed the plan and it is now on the Governor’s desk awaiting signature.

The Wisconsin legislature is rushing through a redistricting plan so they can lock in the maps before the scheduled recall elections can change who has the power to draw district lines. In that rush, prison-based gerrymandering is poised to have an even greater impact on state, county and municipal districts than it did a decade ago.

The Census Bureau counts Wisconsin prisoners as if they were residents of the communities where they are incarcerated, even though they can’t vote and remain legal residents of the places they lived prior to incarceration. Crediting thousands of people to other communities has staggering implications for Wisconsin’s democracy, which uses the Census to apportion political power on the basis of equally-sized state and county legislative districts.

Wisconsin’s 53rd Assembly district has the highest concentration of prisons in the state. The 53rd District claims 5,583 incarcerated people as residents of the district, even though state law says that incarcerated people remain residents of their homes. All districts send some people to prison, although some districts send more than others. But not all districts have prisons, and concentrating 23,000 prisoners in a handful of districts enhances the weight of a vote cast in those districts and dilutes all votes cast elsewhere.

In Wisconsin, this impact is largest in District 53, where without using prison populations as padding, the district would be 10% below the required size. This gives every 90 residents of the 53rd district the same influence as 100 residents of any other district in the state.

If that seems insignificant, consider that the Supreme Court allows districts to have populations that are 5% too large or small if the state can protect some other legitimate state interest by doing so. The federal judges who have for decades drawn Wisconsin’s state legislative districts have had an even higher standard, allowing only a 1% deviation from strict population equality. The Republican majority of the legislature which drew the new districts took an even higher standard in the Assembly, drawing districts that are, by Census counts, no more than 0.4% too large or small.

The state’s efforts to carefully draw districts that give each district the same population and the same political influence is clearly overshadowed by the decision to use the Census Bureau’s data that credited incarcerated people to the wrong location when drawing districts, and created one of the most distorted state legislative districts in the county. The systematic bias introduced by drawing districts based on Census Bureau prison counts becomes clear when you look in detail at District 53:

District 53 purports to have a large African-American population, larger than 74 other districts. But of the 2,784 African-Americans in the district, all but 590 are incarcerated. The day the people incarcerated in the district are allowed to vote again, they will be on a bus, heading back to their home district. The 53rd District is claiming populations that are not a part of this district and never will be.

The state Assembly is not the only part of Wisconsin to raise the ante on prison-based gerrymandering and draw districts more distorted than they did a decade ago. In our previous research, we found some of the most dramatic examples of prison-based gerrymandering in the country in Wisconsin cities and counties. With two notable exceptions, counties appear to have been unable or unwilling to find a solution to competing state laws that indirectly require them to use the unadjusted Census numbers and engage in prison-based gerrymandering.

The two exceptions are Dodge County, and the City of Waupun. These communities did something clever: they split each large prison between 2 or 3 neighboring districts. Those districts still get credited with an incarcerated population that actually resides somewhere else, but the size of the vote enhancement in any individual district is smaller. And by extension, this reduces the extent to which votes are diluted in other Dodge County or City of Waupun districts.

With Dodge County and the City of Waupun finding solutions, albeit partial ones, the mantle for the most dramatic examples of prison-based gerrymandering is likely going to fall to Chippewa, Juneau, and Waushara counties, all of which saw new prisons built or expanded over the last decade, and all of which appear to be drawing individual county districts that are more than 50% incarcerated. In each of these counties, if you live next to the prisons, you’ll get twice the influence over the future of our county as residents who live elsewhere. That’s not fair. It likely violates the federal constitution’s guarantee of equal representation, and it certainly doesn’t make any sense.

We concede — when fairness and logic aren’t enough to avoid prison-based gerrymandering — that it is technically possible to draw a district that is half incarcerated. One town in Iowa had a district that was 96% incarcerated, until citizens intervened. So what are we watching for at the Prison Policy Initiative headquarters? We’re waiting to see how the cities of New Lisbon and Stanley draw their city districts. There, unless they take action, they’ll be faced with drawing districts that are more than 100% incarcerated. This impossibility could produce some of the most dramatic examples of prison-based gerrymandering in the country. Will those cities follow the state legislature’s blind rush into prison-based gerrymandering and end up drawing one or more City Council districts with no voters? Stay tuned.

By Yonat Shimron and Adelle M. Banks
c. 2011 Religion News Service

RALEIGH, N.C. (RNS) In the two months since North Carolina’s legislature laid off most of its prison chaplains, Betty Brown, director of prison chaplaincy services, has been crisscrossing the state searching for volunteers who can attend to the religious needs of Native American, Wiccan and Rastafarian prisoners.

State legislators had assumed volunteer ministries would jump in and help prisoners meet the ritual and devotional needs of their faiths. But so far, that hasn’t happened.

“It’s been tough locating volunteers for those faith groups,” said Brown, whose department lost 26 full-time prison chaplains as part of an effort to close a $2.6 billion state budget gap.

Across the nation, religious life behind bars is changing as correctional departments face budget cuts along with other state agencies. Some states like North Carolina have seen outright cuts. In other states, vacancies due to hiring freezes mean no replacements for chaplains who die or retire.

Gary Friedman, spokesman for the American Correctional Chaplains Association, said his organization distributes brochures to explain to legislators mulling cuts the benefits of retaining correctional chaplains.

“Chaplains are getting caught up in all these budget reductions and staff reductions,” he said. “It’s going on all over the country.”

Some states, such as Texas, were able to spare chaplains in the budget negotiations.

But in other states, prison chaplains are seeing increasing workloads in tough economic times, even as the religious diversity of inmates continues to grow.

In California, where about 130 prison chaplains are currently employed, there are three dozen vacancies.

At the California Men’s Colony, a medium- and minimum-security prison in San Luis Obispo, Rabbi Lon Moskowitz, the Jewish chaplain, is helping fulfill the duties of a Muslim chaplain who died a few months ago.

“Twice a month … I oversee their Juma prayer,” he said.

During Passover and summer solstice observances, he said, some Jewish and Native American inmates were unable to attend communal events due to lockdowns in their yards prompted by budget-related shortages in guards.

“They had to observe their religious service within their assigned housing unit,” said Lt. Dean Spears, a spokesman for the facility.

Indiana’s prisons — which have 9 vacancies among 37 chaplain positions — have had similar restrictions when overseen by skeleton crews at times when inmates might have attended chapel, said the Rev. Stephen Hall, director of religious services for the Indiana Department of Correction.

When there’s a drastic cut in chaplains, as in North Carolina, questions arise about everyday religious concerns as well as special or weekly observances.

“Lay people tend to think chaplains perform services on holy days,” said D. Craig Horn, a North Carolina legislator who opposed his state’s chaplaincy cuts. “My view is a professional chaplain adds stability and has a tremendous impact on promoting calm and providing prisoners with counseling and direction.”

A onetime church volunteer who helped prisoners prepare for the world outside, Horn also knows that volunteers aren’t trained to do the kind of interfaith work that chaplains provide daily — whether it’s kosher meals for Jews, prayer rugs for Muslims, or sage and sweet grass for American Indians to burn as they offer praise to the Four Winds.

Pat Nolan, vice president of Prison Fellowship, said chaplains are the ones most likely to help inmates after riots, rapes and other traumatic incidents or to facilitate special requests — like a phone call from a relative near death.

“For the safety of the institution, it’s important that persons going through those horrible situations have someone to help them to defuse the situation,” he said. “Otherwise, tension can get really high or out of control.”

Nolan said his evangelical organization — which also has faced its own staff cuts due to the economy — urged volunteers to contact legislators and fight for the Texas chaplains.

With North Carolina, there simply wasn’t time: “It was a done deal before we could mobilize anybody.”

But the well-being and safety of prisoners aren’t the only reasons to keep chaplains. There are legal issues too, state prison officials say.

The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 puts government agencies on alert that they can’t get in the way of the free religious practice of prisoners. With no professional chaplains left in North Carolina’s medium and minimum-security prisons, that legal requirement has become the biggest headache for Brown, the prison chaplaincy director.

Some worry the civil rights of prisoners may be violated by volunteer Christian ministries who, however sincere, may also be motivated to make converts.

“Inmates have a right to practice their faith while they’re incarcerated,” said the Rev. Mark Reamer, a Roman Catholic priest who has celebrated Mass at a Raleigh prison for the past 16 years. “Chaplains ensure a certain fairness.”

Tom O’Connor, a former Oregon prison chaplain who runs the company Transforming Corrections, said chaplains have to advocate more effectively about their contributions — not only supporting inmates but mobilizing volunteers and helping with re-entry programs that can reduce recidivism.

“Most of these prisoners are going to get out,” said Horn, the North Carolina state legislator. “We don’t want them to come back. That would be a lousy investment. The state of North Carolina needs to protect its investment.”

Copyright © The National Catholic Reporter Publishing Company