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.

Today, the Council of State Governments released a new report that helps to raise awareness about the importance of dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline.  Entitled Breaking Schools’ Rules: A Statewide Study of How School Discipline Relates to Students’ Success and Juvenile Justice Involvement, the report is the most in-depth of its kind, examining the academic, disciplinary, and juvenile court records of nearly a million Texas secondary school students.  Sadly, it confirms the national trend that LDF has observed in its Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline initiative:  educational inequity, excessive reliance upon harsh disciplinary practices, and extreme racial disparities in both.

By George E. Curry
“Collectively, the pathway data show that more than 51 percent of Hispanic males, 45 percent of African American males, 42 percent of Native American males and 33 percent of Asian American males ages 15-24 will end up unemployed, incarcerated or dead.”

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) congratulates California Assembly member Mike Davis on the passage in the California State Assembly last week of legislation designed to end prison-based gerrymandering in the state.

Zero-tolerance rules, once hailed as the panacea to an explosion of serious student misbehavior in schools, are now recognized more and more as part of the problem, not the solution.

By Stacey Patton
Last week the Supreme Court ordered California to reduce its prison population because dangerous overcrowding has created unsanitary and unsafe conditions constituting “cruel and unusual punishment.”

This week, top civil rights organizations filed a motion in New York Supreme Court asking to intervene to help defend New York’s new law allocating people in prison to their home communities for redistricting and reapportionment.

Monday, May 16, 2011 By: Celeste Katz Source: NY Daily News Thousands of New York prisoners are being set free – from being counted in upstate Republicans’ state Senate districts. Under the federal Voting Rights Act, the Department of Justice has just approved counting inmates in their hometowns – not where they’re locked up – [...]