TERRE HAUTE —
Should inmates in the U.S. federal penitentiary continue to be counted as residents of one of Terre Haute’s City Council districts?
That’s the question being posed to the nine-member council this month by the city’s legal department, which is tasked with redrawing City Council district boundaries by the end of the year. The City Council will ultimately have the final say in approving the new districts.
Every ten years, Terre Haute officials must redraw council districts based on new census numbers. But this year, city officials would like to exclude the population of the federal prison from the count. Doing so will remove an imbalance in the number free citizens each district represents.
Inmates at the federal prison are not eligible to vote, but are counted as part of the population of Terre Haute and are currently part of District 1, represented by Councilwoman Amy Auler.
Auler, a first-term member of the council, said Tuesday she is not opposed to removing the prison population, but would like to see how the change would affect existing council districts before making a decision. Her district would drop to 8,153 residents without the prisoners included. The “ideal” district population is 9,500, meaning more than 1,000 new residents would almost certainly be added to District 1 from other districts in the city.
As a first step in the redistricting process, the city’s legal department tonight will introduce a resolution seeking the council’s blessing for removing the approximately 3,200 inmates in the federal prison from council District 1. The resolution could be voted on next week.
In the past decade, more than 100 communities in the United States have removed non-voting prison populations from legislative districts, said Kelsey Kauffman, an assistant professor of university studies at DePauw University and someone who has taken an interest in prison-population redistricting questions around the country.
Part of the reason communities are removing prison populations from voting districts is the size of those prison populations has grown. Just a few decades ago, prison populations were relatively small meaning their effect on legislative districts was much less noticed, Kauffman said.
“This question really didn’t come up,” she said.
In Terre Haute, the last time redistricting took place, in 2002, the federal prison population was about 1,700. Today that population is nearly twice that number.
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