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The Corrupt Political Scheme Behind US States Paid to House Out-of-State Prisoners [1]

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Date: 2022-08-22

Political and Economic Crime Scene

I’m writing my first post as a Daily Kos contributor in response to DBowman’s query about why US communities get federal funds for prisoners that aren’t part of their population. The simple answer is that these states and localities benefit fiscally by having incarcerated persons within their borders counted in the US Census for the twin purposes of apportioning US House of Representatives seats and allocating federal funds to state and local governments.

Race and racism factor into the mix because out-of-state incarcerated persons involuntarily benefit localities where they have no vote. On the other hand, the states from which these prisoners come lose federal funds and seats in the House.

The original rationale for counting out-of-state incarcerated prisoners in the state where they are housed for voting and funding purposes comes from the three-fifths clause of the US Constitution. This clause was a political compromise between the slave-state founding fathers (slaveholders) and free-state founding fathers (all of whom were white Anglo-Saxon Protestants). The clause counted enslaved black people as 3/5 of a white citizen for apportioning seats in the US House of Representatives based on the first US census. This Faustian bargain preserved chattel slavery in the US in return for slave-state votes to ratify the US Constitution. It also set up the slavery-friendly one-state-two-vote regime that has since anchored the anti-egalitarian US Senate.

During the Jim Crow century that followed the (first?) US Civil War, the slave economy was repurposed and recast as the US-state-local prison system. This racially skewed system has further matured as an increasingly privatized multi-level, taxpayer-funded network of walled neo-slave plantations. Its inmates are disproportionately black and brown and it benefits the mostly-poor, mostly Republican-controlled states that sponsor these human warehouses/sweatshops fiscally and politically. These states have wielded disproportionate political power in the US Congress since the 1930s, when FDR’s New Deal social welfare programs excluded black domestic workers and farm laborers. This is why the federal government has been hamstrung in enforcing civil rights laws since the 1954 Brown v (Topeka, KS) Board of Education Supreme Court decision. It is also why reproductive, LGBTQ, religious, and voting rights have been undermined by an authoritarian religious right political movement in this country since 1994 (when the original right-wing Godfather, Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House).

We must end this miscarriage of political and economic justice if American democracy is to be preserved and strengthened.

For a full reading of the Three-Fifths Clause of the Constitution, check out Article 1, Section 2.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/22/2118078/-The-Corrupt-Political-Scheme-Behind-US-States-Paid-to-House-Out-of-State-Prisoners

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