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Correctional Facility Locator 2020
The Correctional Facility Locator identifies correctional facilities counted in the 2020 Census, so that population numbers can be manually corrected for the purposes of redistricting. (Other tools will be developed later for other purposes, including correcting the distortion done to individual communities' demographic profile.)
We urge researchers to use this tool instead of their practical knowledge of prison locations, because the Census often mixes prison and non-prison populations in the same block, and occasionally does not enumerate prisons at their actual locations.
As we find any errors in the Census we will try to note them in this Locator tool, but for technical reasons there will be errors we cannot flag in the tool, and those, we will track in an external list - currently this file lists errors found in the following states: California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin.
Because it is often important to distinguish between local jails (which contain mostly residents of the county, who are allowed to vote) from state and federal prisons (whose prisoners typically cannot and are generally residents of distant locations), we have started to annotate each block with the name and type of the facility counted there.
If your area of interest does not have annotations yet, we provide links to lists of federal, state and local correctional facilities, their addresses and their populations on the most recent date available. Unfortunately, we will not be able to identify many of the very small facilities counted in the census as they tend to be halfway houses that we do not have a database of addresses for.
Finally, if you can provide or correct any of our annotations, please click on the edit button to submit your data to our editors, so we can then share it with other users of this database.
You do not need to be logged in to use this database. If you would like an account to do extensive editing please contact us.
For other data resources related to prison gerrymandering, see our data page.
Recommended Reading:
About the Prison Policy Initiative
Learn more about the organization behind the Prison Gerrymandering Project.
In prisons, Blacks and Latinos do the time while Whites get the jobs
We explore the racial disparity inside prisons.
Rome NY ends prison gerrymandering, Census Bureau can do better
Rome finally corrected the problem of prison gerrymandering within its borders; other cities and counties need the Census Bureau's help.
Prison-based gerrymandering's historical precedent
This is not the first time a policy barred people of color from the polls and transferred their political power to white voters.