A.G. Gancarski
In a Thursday morning statement, U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown responded to Wednesday’s reports that State House Rep. Janet Adkins advocated packing Brown’s district with prisoners to complicate Brown’s path to re-election.
Brown asserted, in a written statement, that “I have been saying from the outset” that the redrawn boundaries of District 5 make it a “non-performing district not only for an African-American, but for a member of the Democratic Party.”
Pointing out that there are 18 prisons with 17,000 prisoners in the district, which she asserts that those who drew the district knew when drawing it, the black voting age population, which was already reduced to 45 percent in the proposed map, “is, in reality, nowhere near 45 percent.”
The prison concentration, Brown continues, gives the proposed District 5 “one of the highest prison populations in the state,” which makes the count of African-Americans “completely distorted,” rendering the district “extraordinarily difficult for a minority candidate to win.”
We will get comments from Janet Adkins on this matter at the Duval Legislative Delegation meeting on Thursday at 1 p.m. at Jacksonville’s City Hall.
