ST Alpha - "There's a nice little wrinkle to our prison system that I was unaware of." (Reading a Post)

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There's a nice little wrinkle to our prison system that I was unaware of.

Posted by TWuG Feb 20 '13, 07:56

Listening to On Point on NPR.

I was unaware that when the census is taken, prisoners are counted where they are incarcerated and many, many prisons are in rural, predominantly white communities, but they house predominately black and brown prisoners.

So the new district lines are drawn based on the population, the imprisoned people get representation in those new districts, but the voters in those districts are overwhelmingly white.

And they discussed the already known to me fact that we have more prisoners than China despite having less than 1/3 their population.

Responses:

Do prisoners vote? -- nm - Spawn Feb 20, 08:52 2
- It's a state by state issue. Some allow them to and some don't. -- nm - Krusty Feb 20, 08:54 1
  - While in prison, only Maine and Vermont allow felons to vote. -- nm - Krusty Feb 20, 08:56
becuase in China they shoot most of them after trial -- nm - Bacon via droid Feb 20, 08:37 3
- At somewhere between 1500 and 5000 executions a year in China, that isn't at all the reason for the disparity. -- nm - TWuG Feb 20, 08:41 2
  - At year-end 2007 the United States had less than 5% of the world's population[29] and 23.4% of the world's prison and jail population (adult inmates). -- (link) - TWuG Feb 20, 08:43 1
    - We have a serious problem with incarceration. We need to have a serious discussion about why this is happening. - Krusty Feb 20, 08:48

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There's a nice little wrinkle to our prison system that I was unaware of.

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