[DOWNLOAD] "Political Power and Passive Citizenship: The Implications of Considering African American Prisoners As Residents of Rural New York State Districts (Essay)" by Afro-Americans in New York Life and History # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Political Power and Passive Citizenship: The Implications of Considering African American Prisoners As Residents of Rural New York State Districts (Essay)
- Author : Afro-Americans in New York Life and History
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 261 KB
Description
Between the early 1970s and the late 1990s, the number of prisoners in the State of New York soared. The majority of these prisoners were African Americans who used to live in New York City, but served their sentences in upstate rural prisons. This transfer of urban African Americans to rural prisons has had profound political implications. Although state law dictates that these prisoners have no political rights, their numbers have been crucial for the existence of upstate senate districts dominated by conservative legislators who have generally been hostile to African Americans and their interests. If not for the counting of these urban populations as residents of upstate New York, a number of state senate districts would have to be redrawn because of a lack of adequate numbers of residents, meaning that the Republican Party would be unable to dominate the New York state senate, and that downstate New York would be more powerful politically. (2) The counting of disenfranchised African Americans as residents for political apportionment has a long history in the United States and the practice is akin to a condition that I refer to as passive citizenship. Passive citizens are residents of the United States who have no political rights but are counted by the U.S. Census and used for political districting purposes. Depending on the historical period and locality, these groups have included non-citizens, women, minors, Asians, Latinos, Native Americans, and people of African descent. Historically, the counting of disenfranchised populations for political purposes, has provided their oppressors the ability to maintain political power in state and national representative bodies. African Americans constitute the group with the longest and most extreme degree of passive citizenship in the United States. This has been the case with the South, which for more than a century derived immense political power from the numbers of African Americans living in its territory while excluding them from the polls. This has also been the case in the State of New York since the 1970s where upstate rural districts have benefited from the longer sentencing of downstate urban people, since prisons have provided jobs to upstate areas and also political power.