New York Supreme Court Justice Eugene Devine upheld New York’s law ending prison-based gerrymandering in the Little v. LATFOR lawsuit.

By Kenneth J. Cooper
Only eight states publicly report the race and ethnicity of juveniles transferred to adult courts for criminal prosecution, the Justice Department has found, and it’s no wonder that more states don’t. Those that do are sending disproportionate numbers of African-American or Hispanic teenagers to face the possibility of the most serious punishment that a juvenile offender can face—getting locked up in a state prison alongside hardened adult criminals.

By The Editors
California Gov. Jerry Brown Friday signed legislation ending prison-based gerrymandering in the state.

By Colby Hamilton of WNYC.ORG
The New York Supreme Court heard oral arguments yesterday in the lawsuit to overturn a law passed by the 2010 Democratic legislative majority that would count prison inmates in the communities they are from, instead of in the towns and counties where they’re incarcerated.

By Lee A. Daniels
The New York Times reported yesterday that Mark Melvin, a prison inmate in Alabama, is suing the state department of corrections because they won’t let him have a book his attorney sent him. His lawsuit charges that prison officials characterized the book as “a security threat,” as “too incendiary” and “too provocative.”

By Dale Ho and Peter Wagner via the LA Daily News
Prison-based gerrymandering is no trivial matter. There are more than 2 million incarcerated people in America, a total population larger than that of 15 individual states, and larger than our three smallest states combined. If they were a state, the incarcerated population would qualify for five votes in the Electoral College. Where they are counted has tremendous implications for the shape of our democracy.

Prison-based gerrymandering distorts the meaning and reality of democracy and undermines efforts to build fairness into the current redistricting process.

By Lee A. Daniels
America’s policy of mass incarceration – under which the number of black state and federal inmates especially has exploded over the past three decades – has had a starkly negative impact on the lives of millions of black children, and is contributing to “an intergenerational transfer of racial inequality” on a massive scale, two scholars assert in the current issue of an academic journal.

A New York Supreme Court judge has cleared the way for civil rights organizations representing fifteen voters from across New York State to join the Attorney General in defending New York’s law ending “prison-based gerrymandering,” a practice that had distorted representation across New York State.