Help End Prison Gerrymandering Prison gerrymandering funnels political power away from urban communities to legislators who have prisons in their (often white, rural) districts. More than two decades ago, the Prison Policy Initiative put numbers on the problem and sparked the movement to end prison gerrymandering.

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Census Bureau Director blogs: “So, How do You Handle Prisons?”

Census Bureau Director Robert Groves writes on his blog about how incarcerated people are counted in the Census.

by Peter Wagner, March 2, 2010

Census Bureau Director Robert Groves has a new blog post: So, How do You Handle Prisons? that addresses how the Bureau counts people in prison. He discusses the mechanics of the count, the controversy about where incarcerated people should be counted, and some of the logistical and conceptual challenges to fairly and accurately counting incarcerated people in the right spot.

Related briefings:

  1. Congress and Census Bureau Director talk prison gerrymandering +
  2. Census Bureau Updates Definition of “Urban” to Prevent Prisons from Denying Rural Communities an Accurate Label +
  3. “Over a dozen prisons in several different states”: Letter to Census Bureau describes temporary nature of incarceration +

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