Prison Based Gerrymandering
The Pork Choppers are alive and thrive in North Florida. Thanks to Fred Grimm a Miami Herald Columnist I've been informed of a manner of gerrymandering I'd really never thought of.
Prisons are big business in rural areas and in some rural states for sure. West Virginia when it became a state had to decide where the state university would be and where the state prison would be. It came down to a coin toss of sorts. Moundsville won and chose to be the site of the prison, Morgantown lost and became the site of West Virginia University. The Moundsville Prison is now a tourist attraction and on many Saturdays the crowd in the football stadium is larger than any other city in the state for about three hours. Go figure.
Districts in Florida are supposedly equal in the fact they each have about 157,700 people in each district. District Seven in North Florida has about 20,000 inmates in the district. District Five also in North Florida has about 12,000 inmates in the district. Lots of these folks in prison are from South Florida and to add insult to injury they can't vote while in jail. One man one vote has an interesting meaning in these small counties up north. In most ways the prison population is ignored, they don't pay taxes and can't vote, over counted in their prison neighborhood and not counted where they came from. Something is wrong with this picture.
Prisons are big business in rural areas and in some rural states for sure. West Virginia when it became a state had to decide where the state university would be and where the state prison would be. It came down to a coin toss of sorts. Moundsville won and chose to be the site of the prison, Morgantown lost and became the site of West Virginia University. The Moundsville Prison is now a tourist attraction and on many Saturdays the crowd in the football stadium is larger than any other city in the state for about three hours. Go figure.
Districts in Florida are supposedly equal in the fact they each have about 157,700 people in each district. District Seven in North Florida has about 20,000 inmates in the district. District Five also in North Florida has about 12,000 inmates in the district. Lots of these folks in prison are from South Florida and to add insult to injury they can't vote while in jail. One man one vote has an interesting meaning in these small counties up north. In most ways the prison population is ignored, they don't pay taxes and can't vote, over counted in their prison neighborhood and not counted where they came from. Something is wrong with this picture.
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