{"id":1863,"date":"2010-04-19T09:10:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-19T13:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2010\/04\/19\/maryland-first-state-to-count-prisoners-at-home\/"},"modified":"2010-04-19T09:10:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-19T13:10:00","slug":"maryland-first-state-to-count-prisoners-at-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2010\/04\/19\/maryland-first-state-to-count-prisoners-at-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Maryland first state to count prisoners at home"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In February, we reported extensively about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/templates\/story\/story.php?storyId=123663462\">an effort to change<\/a> the way New York State counts prisoners in the census tally. <\/p>\n<p>Instead of counting them <a href=\"http:\/\/www.northcountrypublicradio.org\/news\/story\/15278\/where-should-prisoners-be-counted-in-new-york-the-upstate-view\">in the district where the prison is<\/a> &#8211; and where the inmates share little to no economic, social, or cultural interest &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.northcountrypublicradio.org\/news\/story\/15276\/where-should-prisoners-be-counted-the-downstate-view\">the inmates would be counted at their home address<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>At the time of those reports, no state in country had made such a change, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/02\/11\/us\/politics\/11census.html\">even though the U.S. Census office has offered to make it easy for them<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Maryland has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/04\/15\/opinion\/15thu3.html\">beat the rest of the nation<\/a> to the punch with the first law to count inmates in their home districts.  Advocate Peter Wagner of the Prison Policy Initiative says the new law corrects distortions in state legislative districts:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In  Somerset County, a large prison is 64% of the 1st Commission District, giving  each resident in that district 2.7 times as much influence as residents in other  districts. Even more troubling is that by including the prison population as  &#8220;residents&#8221; in county districts, the county has been unable to draw an effective  majority-African American district and has had no African-American elected to  county government, despite settlement of a vote dilution lawsuit in the 1980s.  <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The North Country would effectively lose power in Albany if a similar change were made in New York.  Do you think it&#8217;s only fair?  Or do you think prison districts deserve the extra credits of including inmates in the local population?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In February, we reported extensively about an effort to change the way New York State [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1863"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1863\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}