A Civil Rights Issue?

In New York State, there will be a battle at the ballot this year (mid-term elections always bring out the best in folks)(Texas is having their gubanatorial election, and while I can name the incumbent and two other well-heeled republicans, I'm having trouble naming a single dem even though there are six running...but that's a different story) over district zoning, and, depending on your point of view, civil rights.

The situation: rural districts in upstate New York that long ago lost their base of manufacturing jobs courted and won the affections of the Department of Corrections, and jobs returned. Prisons placed in rural areas brought economic opportunities to these hard-hit communities (read--impoverished). As compensation for housing criminals in the area, the small rural communities get the prisoners counted as residents in the census; heck, they use energy and resources, why shouldn't the towns where they're being held captive reap the benefits of more federal representation in the House, representation that matches how many bodies are in an area? This is the argument from the rural town point of view.

Why shouldn't they get the benefit of more representation? In New York, felons are disenfranchised. So, giving an amount of representatives to rural communities based on the sheer numbers of voting age eligible people while ignoring the fact that between ten and forty percent of those same voting age eligible people are, in fact, not eligible to vote leaves one community with more power that it would have had otherwise, and one community--the one from which the prisoner left (which tends to be the lower income places in and around the greater New York City metropolitan area)--with less power and less voice.

Civil rights leaders are introducing a bill in the state legislature that might make it to the ballot (New York is the first such state to start this particular battle, but abour seven or eight are about to follow suit (California, Texas, Ohio, et al)) that would count innmates in the census as members of the communities that they've left instead of the areas where their housed now. Their goal is to give more representation to communities that are hurting. (Are impoverished rural communities not hurting?)

Counties with prisons or multiple institutions are already trying to kill the bill.

Now, getting lost in all this, besides the fact that both sides have reasonable points (notwithstanding the disenfranchisement of felons, which is a problem for another post), is that while depressed rural areas losing their manufacturing-job based economy tend to be conservative and depressed low-income inner city areas tend to be big-city liberal, and both sides seem far apart on many things, they do share some very important desires: better schools, better jobs, and better control of drugs and crime in their communities...things that come with political power.