State Supreme Court Upholds Jeffries Law Ending Prison-Based Gerrymandering

A State Supreme Court judge late last week upheld legislation that ends prison-based gerrymandering in the state of New York, ensuring incarcerated populations are counted as residents of their home communities.

Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, (57th A.D.), and New York Attorney General Senator Eric T. Schneiderman introduced the bill in February 2010, when Schneiderman was a state senator. The bill passed in August of that year, making New York only the second state in the country to count incarcerated individuals in their home communities for purposes of legislative reapportionment.

However, nine upstate Republican Senators and a handful of private citizens in April 2011 challenged the law, arguing it was unconstitutional, because the state doesn’t have the power to alter the Census, which is a federally run program.

The suit also claimed that the communities in question would lose political clout, yet still be required to provide basic services – fire, police and infrastructure – to the facilities that house the prisoners, even though they are no longer considered residents.

But Jeffries called the suit baseless: “This lawsuit represents a transparent attempt to breathe life into the prison industrial complex, in order to exploit the continued criminalization of individuals who disproportionally come from low-income, urban communities of color,” said Jeffries.

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. Additionally, according to the Center for Law and Social Justice, 40 percent of all prisoners released each year from upstate prisons return home to Central Brooklyn, where the 57th district is drawn.

Albany County Judge Eugene Devine agreed, ultimately dismissing the challenge and ruling that there were no grounds to prevent the state from enforcing the new law.

The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Jeffries’s bill is a huge victory for the assemblyman whose district had as many as as 17,500 uncounted incarcerated residents, representing enormous resources lost.

“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.

“I congratulate Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and the tireless work of his office to ensure that the principle of 'one person, one vote' was upheld.”

The judge’s decision was rendered in time for prisoners to be counted in their home districts as part of the decennial redistricting process in 2012, which will in turn change district lines across the state.