Site Network: Prison Policy Initiative | Prisoners of the Census

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Minnesota Post article on our new report by Peter Wagner, Mar. 9 Casey Selix writes about our new report, Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in Minnesota in the Minnesota Post: Prison-policy study.... Read more Census Bureau counts Minnesota's incarcerated population in the wrong place; access to democracy distorted by Aleks Kajstura, Mar. 9 New report identifies harm of prison-based gerrymandering in Minnesota, praises Pine County for fixing census flaw. Read more Prison Populations a Big Issue for Census by Peter Wagner, Mar. 9 The Census Project Blog has posted my guest blog post: Prison Populations a Big Issue for Census. Check it out..... Read more

Prison-based gerrymandering dilutes your vote

“There are many ways to hijack political power. One of them is to draw state or city legislative districts around large prisons — and pretend that the inmates are legitimate constituents.”—Brent Staples

map of Anamosa districts

Called prison-based gerrymandering, the practice finds its clearest example in Anamosa, Iowa where a large prison was almost an entire city council district. Council districts are supposed to contain the same number of people, but basing districts on non-voting non-resident prison populations gives a handful of residents the same political power as thousands of residents elsewhere in the city.

Learn more about Anamosa:

New York Times article thumbnail Census Bureau's Counting of Prisoners Benefits Some Rural Voting Districts by Sam Roberts, New York Times, October 24, 2008
iowa public radio logo Prisons and City Elections, by Joyce Russell, Iowa Public Radio, November 3, 2009. Listen: m3u mp3

The Census Bureau should not be enabling prison-based gerrymandering

This website documents the work of the Prison Policy Initiative. We examine a once-obscure Census Bureau glitch that undermines our democracy and suggest workable federal, state and local solutions that would reduce the harm caused by the Census Bureau's prison miscount.

graphic showing that many New York City residents are credited to upstate prisons

Animation by Adell Donaghue Design

The Census Bureau counts people in prison as if they were residents of the communities where they are incarcerated, even though they remain legal residents of the places they lived prior to incarceration. As Census data is used to apportion political power at all levels of government, crediting thousands of disproportionately urban and minority men to other communities has staggering implications for modern American democracy.

In New York State, for example, one out of every three people who moved to upstate New York in the 1990s actually “moved” into a newly constructed prison. The State bars people in prison from voting, but their presence in the Census boosts the population of the upstate districts whose legislators favor prison expansion. Without this phantom population, 7 upstate New York State Senate districts would not meet minimum population requirements and would have to be redrawn.

Our 2002 report, Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York was the first district-by-district analysis of the impact of the prison miscount on state legislative redistricting and the first to suggest workable policy solutions.

In the years since, we’ve extended our New York research to examine how inaccurate Census data has caused democratic distortion in more than 11 states and 200 counties.

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