The Ohio State Penitentiary near Youngstown, Ohio, is seen through the perimeter fencing, March 31, 2005. AP file photo

YOUNGSTOWN — The Prison Policy Initiative, a national organization that seeks to stop the practice of counting inmates when redistricting is done by government entities, expressed disappointment that Youngstown council approved a new ward map that includes prisoners.

The PPI, based in Northampton, Mass., was influential in getting Youngstown council not to count inmates at the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center, a private prison, during the last redistricting in 2015 — though the city still included those incarcerated at the Ohio State Penitentiary, a state-run supermax prison, and the county jail in that ward map.

When Youngstown chose not to count prisoners in the private prison, it became only the second city in Ohio not to count at least some inmates in ward redistricting.

Lima was the first and now is the only city in Ohio that doesn’t include inmates in redistricting, said Aleks Kajstura, PPI’s legal director.

“It’s definitely disappointing to see cities move toward more prison gerrymandering while the country is moving in the other direction,” she said of Youngstown council’s decision. “When you do that, you’re distorting the representation on city council. You’re not drawing lines that actually represent city residents. There’s no good reason to engage in this practice.”

Mike Ray, D-4th Ward, the senior member of council and the only one serving since the 2015 redistricting, said the reason council decided to again count inmates at the private prison was to try and equalize populations of wards. That’s because the 2nd Ward, where it is located on the city’s East Side, is “huge in geographic size” and it wouldn’t have been fair to make it even larger by not including prisoners but adding residents, he said.

“The 2nd Ward is almost one-third of the city” with inmates counted, Ray said. “You could probably fit the 4th, 5th and 6th Wards into the 2nd Ward. If it was a different ward it might have been a different circumstance. But based on the data with the population and size, to make the wards balanced it made sense this time to count them.”

Counting inmates in the private prison and the supermax means about one in every five residents in the 2nd Ward is incarcerated.

“City council is supposed to represent those who live in those cities,” Kajstura said. “Inmates don’t live in that particular section of the city. They are housed there. It’s a disconnect.”

She added: “Folks in the county jail are required to vote absentee” based on where they lived before going to jail.

PPI is a national nonprofit seeking to end mass incarcerations. As part of that, it also seeks to stop the practice of prison gerrymandering, Kajstura said.

“Prison gerrymandering leads to shifts of legislative power and priorities,” she said. “At the city level, it impacts representation. We found city councilors — even though the folks in prison are counted — are not responsive to them. In many ways, they have no control over those people anyway. What we want is fair representation.”

Nationally, 11 states have passed or enacted legislation to end various aspects of prison gerrymandering, such as not including inmates in state redistricting counts with some also mandating it at the local government level, according to PPI. A decade ago, only four states had such laws.

Ohio is not one of the states, and there is no indication it is moving in that direction.

YOUNGSTOWN REDISTRICTING

Youngstown council was under a time restriction in its city charter to approve a new ward redistricting map by last Tuesday. Most of council learned eight days prior to that date that the deadline was approaching after Tom Hetrick, the new council president, discovered the issue a few days earlier while reading the city charter.

City voters had overwhelmingly approved a charter amendment

Nov. 8, 2016, to require redistricting 180 days after the publication of the U.S. Census to draw new lines if there was a difference of at least 10 percent between the most populous and least populous wards.

After the latest census, which came out Aug. 17, 2021, there was a 16 percent difference between the 7th Ward, with 9,107 residents, and the 6th Ward, with 7,653 residents — thus requiring new lines.

The city’s overall population declined to 60,068 in the latest census from 66,982 a decade earlier.

The map approved by council has an 8.4 percent population difference between the 2nd Ward, where the private prison and supermax facility are located, with 8,856 people and the 6th Ward, which includes most of the South Side, with 8,197 residents.

Before the 2015 redistricting, city council hadn’t changed the ward lines in more than 30 years. Because of that, the population in the wards ranged from 7,227 to 12,130, a difference of more than 40 percent, using 2010 census numbers.

It also took more than a year for council in 2015 to agree to the new lines after lengthy disputes and months where the issue wasn’t addressed.

“When you look at the big picture, these (recent) meetings weren’t contentious,” Ray said. “This was just maintenance unlike the last time. There were arguments for and against counting prisoners. But to make the maps work with natural boundaries, we went this way.”

dskolnick@vindy.com