Brenda Wright, an attorney with the public policy group Demos — which backed the lawsuit along with the Prison Policy Initiative — said the the litigation was aimed at getting localities to account for prisoners where it truly counts.
The ruling concluded that Cranston artificially inflated the population of Ward 6 by treating all inmates of the ACI as residents of the prison for redistricting purposes.
``I’m thrilled that our fight for equal representation has been successful,’’ said Karen Davidson, lead plaintiff, in a news release. ``Fairness in redistricting is a fundamental right and I’m glad the court has vindicated our claims.’’
Lagueux gave the city thirty days to redraw the districts.
“This is a big win for democracy,” said Adam Lioz of Demos, counsel for the plaintiffs. “Prison gerrymandering distorts representation and should no longer be tolerated. This decision should pave the way for other courts to address this long-standing problem.”
Plaintiffs argued that the "prison gerrymandering" improperly considered ACI prisoners as constituents of local elected officials when they are instead "residents of their pre-incarceration communities for virtually all legal purposes, including voting."
"I'm thrilled that our fight for equal representation has been successful," said lead plaintiff Karen Davidson, of Cranston. "Fairness in redistricting is a fundamental right and I'm glad that the court has vindicated our claims."
Today, six in ten employers say that they check the credit histories of some or all prospective employees before making final hiring decisions. This traps many jobseekers in a devastating catch-22.
The first platform committee meeting for the 2016 Democratic National Convention, featuring representatives from both campaigns as well as DNC neutrals, took place on Wednesday. Their deliberations will likely feature tough negotiations on a range of issues — a $15 minimum wage, fracking, the legitimacy of giant banks — that were points of contention during the campaigning, helping clarify the political and ideological shift that has taken place in the party since the mid-1990s when Robert Rubin was its intellectual lodestar.
It’s not every day that low-paid workers — cleaners mopping the floors of Washington’s Union Station, vendors selling pretzels at the National Zoo, servers dishing out hot lunch at congressional cafeterias — speak out and win a voice in setting national policy. Yet three years ago, that’s exactly what began to happen.
In May 2013, workers employed by private companies under contract with the federal government came together to form Good Jobs Nation – and walked out on strike in the nation’s capital.
Talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not. And while many Americans believe fervently and faithfully in expanding opportunity, America’s internship-industrial complex does just the opposite.
More bosses are weighing the credit worthiness of job candidates before making a hire — a practice that some lawmakers say unfairly keeps people with bad credit from landing a job.
On Thursday, the Senate takes up a proposal to restrict employers in most cases from using financial information such as credit scores to decide whom to hire, promote or fire. [...]
When the Labor Department ruled last week that 674 workers in the cafeteria of the United States Senate had been denied their full pay in recent years, the contractor that runs the cafeteria said it was an accident. The workers said it was deliberate.
When environmentalists speak of climate change, they often talk of “future generations.” But generations already here are poised to suffer long-term consequences. Climate change will affect millennials drastically—including in their wallets.
Despite lore from parents and grandparents about the caddying jobs or serving gigs they used to pay for school, today’s young adults know the idea of working your way through college is about as antiquated as milk delivered daily in glass bottles or Mad Men-era martini lunches.
Student debt is a crisis, holding back the economy and hobbling a generation. Wonder why today’s young adults aren’t getting married, having children, buying homes, starting businesses, saving the world? Look no further, the culprit is obvious. That’s the conventional wisdom, and it’s taken for granted in many news articles and plenty of policy prescriptions.
The good news: If you’re the parent of a college-bound student, it could be cheaper to send your young person to an Ivy League school than to your friendly neighborhood public institution, a potential bargain for families struggling to pay for tuition, room, and board.
A federal judge in Ohio laid out a plan on Wednesday for the state to restore voting privileges for people who were illegally removed from the state's voter rolls over the past five years.
Like teens gathered around a slumber party campfire, pollsters and news outlets appear to be turning toward a giant game of “would you rather” to help understand the student debt mess.