Another potential delay to Colorado’s redistricting process? Counting prisoners – By Thy Vo (Colorado Sun) / May 6 2021
Colorado and eight other states are changing how they count prisoners for redistricting, so counties with prison-inflated populations don’t get more political representation than they should.
Redrawing Colorado’s legislative and congressional boundaries was already going to be a race against the clock because of a monthslong delay in receiving data from the U.S. Census Bureau. But another factor could worsen the time crunch: counting prison inmates.
Last year, Colorado lawmakers passed House Bill 1010, which requires that redistricting count the state’s 14,000 inmates at their last-known address before they were incarcerated, rather than at the correctional facility where they are housed. But the task of reallocating the state’s prison population could be time-consuming, and the nonpartisan staffers tasked with handling the data worry that, on top of the census data delay, the process could jeopardize their ability to finalize maps and avoid delays to the 2022 election.
“We’re, quite frankly, very concerned that the time that it will take to do all of that will make it impossible for the commissions and the Supreme Court to do their work by the end of the year,” Jeremiah Barry, an attorney for Colorado’s independent congressional and legislative redistricting commissions, testified Monday at a House State Affairs Committee.
Advocates for changing how prisoners are counted say the Census Bureau’s method of counting incarcerated people skews the demographic profiles of the rural, largely white districts where prisons are in Colorado. Prison populations tend to be disproportionately people of color, and counting prisoners based on where they are incarcerated effectively hands representation of minorities to areas where their demographic power is diluted.
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