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.
Census Bureau should conduct small-scale tests of methods for collecting home addresses of incarcerated people to determine how best to implement a revision of the Residence Criteria and Residence Situations for people who are in correctional facilities on Census Day.
Today, we submitted a joint comment letter from 36 criminal justice, voting rights, and census and data equity advocate organizations in response to the Census Bureau’s recent federal register notice about small-scale tests as part of its planning for the 2030 Census. While the Bureau is only seeking generic clearance — not specifying any particular tests — we took this opportunity to highlight the need for early testing of how best to count incarcerated people at home and end prison gerrymandering .
Prison gerrymandering is a problem created because the Census Bureau incorrectly counts incarcerated people as residents of their prison cells rather than their home communities. As a result, when states use Census data to draw new state or local districts, they inadvertently give residents of districts with prisons greater political clout than all other state residents.
As the comment notes, it has been nearly 20 years since the Census Bureau last considered how it could go about counting incarcerated people at their home addresses. It is past time that that Bureau update that analysis, and the comment letter proposes three specific methods that the Cesnus Bureau should test. If you’d like to read the (rather technical) details, the full letter is available at this link.
We’ve identified over 200 cities and counties that have taken action to avoid prison gerrymandering and some local governments that still continue to base representation on flawed Census Bureau data.
The movement to end prison gerrymandering started with local governments. Because of their relatively small size, city and county governments often experience the most distortive impacts of the problem. When drawing districts in these communities, a single prison can easily account for an entire city council or county commission district. This not only makes it impossible for officials to draw fair districts, but it also gives some residents as much as five times1 the political clout of other residents of the community.
Prison gerrymandering is a problem created because the Census Bureau incorrectly counts incarcerated people as residents of their prison cells rather than their home communities. As a result, when states and local governments use Census data to draw new political boundaries, they inadvertently give residents of districts with prisons greater political clout than all other residents.
It can be incredibly difficult to know whether a local government has ended prison gerrymandering, but we’ve done much of that legwork for you. We have two pages covering our prison gerrymandering research on local governments — spanning three decades:
Building these lists takes painstaking research. Very few states have centralized records of local redistricting maps, so we reached out to nearly every city, county, and other local government on those lists to figure out whether they ended prison gerrymandering. We gather the maps, analyze the population data, sift through council meeting notes, and interview local officials to come to our conclusions. Sometimes, regional or state organizations do similar research to supplement our efforts, or individuals working in or living in these areas will add their findings to the collection.
There are two important notes about these lists:
As you can guess, it’s impossible to do this research for all of the nearly 40,000 town, city, and county governments in the US. So, we focus on those that are most likely to yield significant or interesting results. As a result, both of these lists are almost certainly undercounts of the places that do — or don’t — engage in prison gerrymandering.
Many states that have passed prison gerrymandering reform laws also cover local governments under those measures. To make the best use of our time and resources, we didn’t research to confirm whether cities or count in those states ended prison gerrymandering, so they don’t appear on these lists.
Because of these two factors, these lists shouldn’t be considered comprehensive or used for any conclusive comparison between decades. These lists are only a partial reflection of the general decline in the number of local governments engaging in prison gerrymandering, and the general increase in local governments avoiding prison gerrymandering, and don’t show the full story of prison-hosting communities increasingly rejecting prison gerrymandering.
We also encourage you to check out our Pathfinder tool, for more information on the issue, including dozens of state-by-state and district-by-district reports, hundreds of articles and fact sheets, and more spread across our website (and even some notable resources from other organizations, too).
These resources provide important information and context about prison gerrymandering for local officials, journalists, and advocates. It can help to show the scale of the problem in their communities, as well as put a spotlight on those places that have taken on the task of solving this problem.
Footnotes
For example, Juneau County, WI contains one of the most prison gerrymandered county commission districts in the nation, where incarcerated people account for roughly 83% of the district’s population. As a result, 17 actual residents of this district have as much political clout as 100 residents of any other district in the county. ↩
Census Bureau should stop its one-size-fits-all approach to privacy protections and refrain from adding “noise” when it reports the number of incarcerated people; states need accurate counts to end prison gerrymandering
Last week the Prison Policy Initiative and Common Cause sent a letter to the Census Bureau urging it to publish data in a way that makes it easier for states to end prison gerrymandering.
Prison gerrymandering is a problem created because the Census Bureau incorrectly counts incarcerated people as residents of their prison cells rather than their home communities. As a result, when states and local governments use Census data to draw new political boundaries, they inadvertently give residents of districts with prisons greater political clout than all other residents.
After the 2020 count, the Census Bureau added another wrinkle to prison gerrymandering reform by taking a new approach to its data privacy protections that unintentionally made it harder for states to adjust their redistricting data to count incarcerated people at home. Every decade, the Bureau’s privacy protections ensure that no single person can be identified in the census data, and that everyone’s answers on the census forms remain private. This privacy guarantee is a statutory requirement, but the Census Bureau is free to achieve this privacy through whichever method it sees fit.
For the 2020 Census, the Bureau picked a new privacy method called differential privacy, which injects “noise” into the population data published by the census. This “noise” essentially takes the correctional facility populations and adds or subtracts a statistically-determined number of people in the population data published for the census. This had the consequence of undermining states’ efforts to address prison gerrymandering, as the letter explains:
There are 19 states that have formally addressed prison gerrymandering, these states account for nearly half (49.6) of the US population.
Although the approaches to population adjustments differ among the 19 states, they all rely on accurate counts of correctional facility populations to adjust redistricting data to avoid or limit prison gerrymandering.
In each case, the Bureau’s application of privacy protections added an unnecessary impediment to their data adjustment efforts. Facility populations are public. In most states, they are published – along with other demographic statistics – on state websites.
The letter concludes by asking the Bureau to stop undermining state efforts to end prison gerrymandering:
The Bureau should update its residence criteria to count incarcerated people at home. But if the Bureau continues to count all incarcerated people as if they were residents of the correctional facility they happen to be held at on census day then the correctional facility populations should be held invariant (or kept unchanged) to decrease the burden on the states that are correcting their redistricting data to count incarcerated people at home or last known address.
2030 Census Advisory Committee's inaugural meeting ended in recommendations that future agenda include discussions of the Census Bureau's approach to counting incarcerated people in the 2030 Census.
On Friday the 2030 Census Advisory Committee held their inaugural meeting and voted to put prison gerrymandering on its agenda. (That’s actually more exciting than it sounds.) The recommendation to discuss the topic in depth was both in reaction to a public comment submitted to the Committee by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights on behalf of its prison gerrymandering working group, as well as Committee members’ own expertise identifying prison gerrymandering as an issue that needs to be addressed for the 2030 Census.
The topics of discussion for the Committee’s first meeting were largely (and procedurally) limited to on hard-to-count and historically undercounted populations, but committee members Jeri Green (National Urban League’s 2020 Census Black Roundtable) and Ben Williams (National Conference of State Legislatures) requested that the committee address two issues related to prison gerrymandering at a future meeting:
The Census Bureau’s residence criteria for incarcerated people, which is based on an outdated interpretation of the Bureau’s “residence rule”, and means that people are counted as if they were residents of a correctional facility.
The 2030 Census Advisory Committee is charged with “advis[ing] the Census Bureau in conducting an accurate decennial census.” And it is in that role that it recommended that the “a future committee meeting include a discussion on residence criteria for those who are incarcerated. … [And] that there be a future discussion regarding the impact of disclosure avoidance policies on the 2030 Census.” These issues accounted for two out of the three topics recommended for discussion by the Committee.
The 2030 Census Advisory Committee operates in an advisory capacity to the Census Bureau, and as such their focus on prison gerrymandering sends a strong message to the Census Bureau that it must consider how to count incarcerated people at home in the 2030 Census.
Last week, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights — a coalition of more than 240 national organizations to promote and protect the rights of all persons in the United States — sent a letter to the Census Bureau urging it to end prison gerrymandering. Specifically, the group called on the Bureau to “update the current residence rules to maintain the accuracy of the census, ensure fair representation of incarcerated individuals within their home communities, and to prioritize equity among all residents regardless of their incarceration status.”
Prison gerrymandering is a problem created because the Census Bureau incorrectly counts incarcerated people as residents of their prison cells rather than their home communities. As a result, when states use Census data to draw new state or local districts, they inadvertently give residents of districts with prisons greater political clout than all other state residents.
The letter follows up on a meeting with staff from the Census Bureau’s Population Division, which oversees how the “residence rule” — is applied to people in different living situations at Census time. To end prison gerrymandering, the Bureau needs to update how it applies its residence rule for incarcerated people to ensure an accurate Census. While is a plethoraof reasonsit should do so, the letter focuses on 5 key points:
The residence rules must reflect the real-life circumstances of incarcerated persons and the needs of the states and communities in which they live.
Representation and, therefore, democracy, are distorted by counting incarcerated persons where they are housed on Census Day rather than in the home communities to which most will return.
Incarcerated people are not part of the social and economic fabric of the communities surrounding the facilities where they are serving their sentences.
Criteria used to apply the residence rule to incarcerated people should be applied in the same manner as for other people away from home on Census Day.
Equity requires counting incarcerated people at home.
For details on all 5 points, check out the letter (or PDF).
With Governor Tim Walz's signature, the state is the latest to reject the Census Bureau’s flawed and outdated way of counting incarcerated people.
May 20, 2024
On Friday, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz signed HF 4772 — an omnibus elections policy bill — into law, officially ending prison gerrymandering in the state. With this action, Minnesota joins the rapidly growing list of states that have taken action on this issue. The measure requires state and local governments to count incarcerated people at their home addresses when drawing new political districts during their redistricting process.
Prison gerrymandering is a problem created because the Census Bureau incorrectly counts incarcerated people as residents of their prison cells rather than their home communities. As a result, when states use Census data to draw new state or local districts, they inadvertently give residents of districts with prisons greater political clout than all other state residents.
“With this law, yet another state has rejected the Census Bureau’s flawed way of counting incarcerated people to ensure its residents have an equal voice in their government,” said Aleks Kajstura, Legal Director of the Prison Policy Initiative and the head of the organization’s campaign to end prison gerrymandering. “Roughly half the country now lives in a place that has ended prison gerrymandering. With so many places taking action on this issue, it raises the question, ‘Will the Census Bureau listen to the growing consensus on this issue, or will it cling to its outdated and misguided way of counting people in prisons and jails in 2030?'”
The provisions ending prison gerrymandering in the state were initially introduced as standalone measures and were rolled into this omnibus election bill.
Avoiding carveouts in prison gerrymandering reforms
Carveouts that exclude certain incarcerated people from bills to end prison gerrymandering undermine their impact and continue to distort democracy.
During the House debate on the measure, a representative introduced an amendment to limit the impact of the reforms by continuing to count people who have served ten consecutive years in prison or have over a decade remaining on their sentence at the prison. Fortunately, this poison-pill amendment was rejected, but it explains why other states considering similar reforms should also avoid this type of carveout.
Misguided amendments like this ignore the reality that, regardless of an incarcerated person’s sentence length, they are still not a member of the prison community. Additionally, nationally 75% of people in prison serve time in more than one facility, while 12% of people serve time in at least five facilities before returning home. These amendments also assume that a person will serve their full sentence and that sentencing policies or release mechanisms in a given state will remain static over a ten-year period, two things that are far from certain.
States shouldn’t undermine their own progress on this issue. When they end prison gerrymandering, they should ensure those reforms include all people incarcerated in the state’s prisons.
Most states have clauses in their constitutions or statutes that explicitly say that prisons are not a residence — whether someone is incarcerated away from home for a few months or a few decades — yet the Census Bureau continues to count people as if they are. The Census Bureau has the authority to change how it counts incarcerated people and officially end prison gerrymandering at the national level, but inaction has forced state and local officials to pass reforms and shoulder the burden of correcting flawed Census redistricting data to count incarcerated people at home.
In addition to Minnesota, eighteen other states — including “red” states like Montana, “blue” states like New York, and “purple” states like Maine — have recognized the impact of prison gerrymandering on political representation and have taken action to provide more equal representation to their residents. Progress on this issue has been so swift that the staunchly bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures recently called the movement to end prison gerrymandering “the fastest-growing trend in redistricting.”
With Minnesota adding itself to this rapidly growing trend, there is yet another reason for the Census Bureau to finally change how it counts incarcerated people and end prison gerrymandering nationwide.
Download our one-pager for a quick summary of the evidence that shows incarcerated people return home after their release.
Incarcerated people return to their home communities after release. That’s a fact that is obvious to anyone who lives in a community hard hit by mass incarceration. Yet when states seek to end prison gerrymandering by counting incarcerated people at home for redistricting purposes, some people ask why we should use someone’s home address — concerned that they might not return to that exact place after release or even might stay in the prison town.
Unfortunately, because we can’t predict the future and because prisons and jails generally don’t track where people go after their release, this has been a hard question to answer. However, we collected several unique datasets to fill this gap and provide the best evidence possible of where people go after being released from prison. We found:
Incarcerated people don’t generally stay in the area of the prison after their release.
Incarcerated people almost always go back to the communities they came from — if not the exact address they lived at before their arrest.
Counting incarcerated people in prisons is likely the least accurate place to count them.
In theory, every legislative district within a state is supposed to have the same population to ensure everyone has equal representation from elected officials. However, the Census frustrates this goal by counting nearly 2 million incarcerated people as residents of the places in which they are detained instead of at their home addresses. The resulting Census data leads to “prison gerrymandering” — legislative districts that skew representation in favor of people who live near prisons and other correctional facilities.
To avoid prison gerrymandering, states have taken it upon themselves to count incarcerated people at home in their redistricting data. In practical terms, this means counting people at the pre-incarceration address on file with the Department of Corrections.
People don’t stay near the prison after release
There are two widely-accepted truths about mass incarceration:
With this in mind — along with the fact that more than half a million people enter and leave prison every year — you can conclude that if even a small portion of people stayed near the prison after release, those communities would, over time, begin to look similar to those on the inside, but that’s not the case.
In 2015, we released a report that explored the racial geography of mass incarceration. It showed that in 208 counties with prisons, the portion of the free population that was Black was at least 10 times smaller than the portion of the prison population that was Black. These trends were so strong, in fact, that we found 161 counties where the number of incarcerated Black people was actually bigger — by raw number — than the number of free Black people.
If people in prison stayed in those communities after their release, these dramatic disparities would not exist.
People go home after release
Unfortunately, while prison systems generally keep people’s home addresses on file, they don’t track whether they actually return to that address upon release. However, addresses for people on probation and parole can be a reasonably accurate proxy to fill this gap. That’s because a significant number of incarcerated people are on probation or parole after their release.
Comparing these two sets of addresses, we can get a sense of whether people return to where they came from after incarceration. If the portion of incarcerated people from an area is similar to the portion of people on probation or parole from that area, you can reasonably conclude that people are returning to their home communities after incarceration.
Rhode Island serves as a useful example for this analysis because all of its correctional facilities, including pre-trial facilities, are located in one correctional complex (in the city of Cranston). In most states, people are held pre-trial in jails, usually close to home, but in Rhode Island, they are incarcerated equally far from home, whether they are held for a few days or a few years.
Percentage of people incarcerated or on probation/parole in Rhode Island’s five largest cities
Municipality
Percentage of incarcerated people from the city
Percentage of people on probation or parole from the city
Providence
38.2%
33.0%
Pawtucket
11.9%
11.2%
Woonsocket
8.1%
8.2%
Cranston
7.6%
6.2%
Warwick
4.6%
5.4%
Examining this data for the five largest cities in the state, you see that the numbers align quite closely, reinforcing the fact that incarcerated people almost always return to their home communities after their release.
It is worth noting that Providence, the state’s biggest city, represented a larger portion of the incarcerated population than the probation/parole population. While some may be tempted to say this disproves our point, it is important to remember the context of this time period. The probation/parole data was from December 2020, at the pandemic’s peak, when many urban areas saw their populations dramatically decrease due to health and economic concerns and the desire for more space. Based on the patterns in the other communities, it is reasonable to conclude this data represents pandemic-era fluctuations and should be treated as such.
Importantly, you can also see more incarcerated people come from Cranston than are there while on probation and parole. This is another sign that most people don’t stay near the prison after incarceration unless they are from there originally.
These numbers aren’t a perfect match, which means that the exact address someone ends up at is sometimes different than the one they had on file while incarcerated. However, it clearly shows that people almost always return to their home communities after incarceration.
Prison is the least accurate place for the Census Bureau to count incarcerated people
Even if someone is unconvinced by the data showing that incarcerated people are likely to return to their home communities after their release, there are plenty of reasons — backed up by hard data — that make clear that by counting incarcerated people at prisons, the Census Bureau is choosing the least accurate option.
People are incarcerated further from home than most people choose to live
When someone is incarcerated, they are moved far from their daily surroundings and usually locked up somewhere they never visit on their own — let alone live. They’ll likely never know anyone outside of the prison walls, nor rent a house, visit a business, or attend a community event there. So why would the Census Bureau decide this was their home?
People counted at the prison on Census Day aren’t likely there for long
There is a common misconception that a person in a prison will be in that facility for a long time — this is the mistaken belief that is the foundation of the Census Bureau’s choice to count incarcerated people there. But this simply isn’t true.
The average time served by people in state prison is 2.7 years, with this “average” pulled up by the few people serving very long sentences; the median time served is 15 months. Short stays in prison are common. For example, in Rhode Island, the median length of stay for people serving a sentence in the state’s correctional facilities is only 99 days. This means that most people counted at a state prison on Census Day will spend the vast majority of the next decade outside the prison walls.
The home address someone has on file with the Department of Corrections may not be the exact place they return to after incarceration. However, it is a close approximation of where they reside through and after incarceration. While some of these address records may vary in precision, the one address we know is wrong is the facility address.
States that adjust their redistricting data to count incarcerated people at home use the home addresses contained in their Departments of Corrections records. This practice creates redistricting data that better reflects the populations of communities hardest hit by mass incarceration and communities that contain large prison populations. The Census Bureau should count incarcerated people at home in the 2030 Census using home address data as the states have done.
The Probation and Parole data is from December 2020 and the redistricting data is from April 2020 — these are the closest dates available. While the distribution of people in prison in April 2020 geocoded to their hometowns is not a perfect match to the hometowns of people on probation and parole in December 2020, it is close enough to draw some conclusions. It clearly shows that the towns where incarcerated people come from are the same towns where incarcerated people go after release. ↩
The U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) recently announced changes to how federal agencies will collect race and ethnicity data, the first change to these rules since 1997. We and other civil rights groups welcomed these changes because they will present a more nuanced and accurate depiction of the racial and ethnic diversity of the country. The Census Bureau will be following these new standards for the 2030 Census, and so these changes should also prompt states — both those that have ended prison gerrymandering and those that are considering taking that step — to change how they track race and ethnicity data for people in their prisons.
What are the changes and why do they matter?
The new rules do two primary things to the Census count:
Combine race and ethnicity categories into one question: This better aligns with the way people identify themselves — for example, it gives people the option to choose Latino or Hispanic as a racial category, rather than just ethnicity.
Add Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) as a new racial category: Previously people of Middle Eastern or North African descent were aggregated into the white category against their wishes.
How will this impact prison gerrymandering reforms in states?
These changes present some challenges — and opportunities — for states that have ended, or are considering ending, prison gerrymandering.
Prison gerrymandering is a problem the Census Bureau created by counting incarcerated people as residents of their prison cells rather than in their home communities. This artificially inflates the populations of areas that contain prisons, giving them additional political clout when state and local governments use this Census data to draw new district lines every ten years. In states that have ended prison gerrymandering, state officials adjust their redistricting data to count people in prison at their pre-incarceration address, giving a more accurate picture of the area’s population and more equal representation in government.
To address prison gerrymandering, states take the data provided by the Census Bureau and cross-reference it against data collected by their Department of Corrections to reallocate incarcerated people back to their home communities before they draw new political boundaries. Importantly, when drawing these new maps, they not only consider the number of people in a district, but also who the residents of that area are. This is largely to comply with state and federal Voting Rights Acts and constitutional protections to ensure the ability of Black communities — and other racial and ethnic groups — to elect representatives of their choice.
In an ideal world, states and the Census Bureau would track race and ethnicity data in the same way. It would make it easier and more efficient for states to match Census data to their state data when adjusting redistricting data counting incarcerated people in their home communities. However, as the National Conference of State Legislatures reported last year, that’s not the case. Of the states that ended prison gerrymandering after the 2020 redistricting cycle, only one state’s Department of Corrections used the same race and ethnicity categories as the Census Bureau.
States that currently track race and ethnicity differently than the Census Bureau, will still have to do the work to make their data and the Bureau’s data compatible. However, these states should consider these Census changes as an opportunity to improve their data collection and make it more compatible with the Bureau’s data. Here’s how:
States should reform how they collect race and ethnicity data to conform with the updated Office of Management and Budget standards to make comparing data easier for reallocation purposes;
States should provide opportunities for incarcerated people to self-report race and ethnicity data whenever possible to ensure accuracy in the data they collect. When that is not possible, at the very least the Department of Correction should disclose how that data is collected.
Regardless, these new standards do not stand in the way of ending prison gerrymandering.
Roughly half of all U.S. residents now live in a city, county, or state that has ended prison gerrymandering, with more almost certain to join them before the 2030 redistricting cycle. That raises the important question: Instead of forcing states to keep up with the Bureau’s changing data collection and reporting, why not finally change how it counts incarcerated people in 2030?
Last month, U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick struck down Louisiana’s state legislative districts, noting that they unfairly deprived Black residents of political representation in violation of the Voting Rights Act. She ordered the state to draw new legislative maps to resolve this issue.
Importantly, in her ruling, Judge Dick noted how the over-incarceration of Black people harms their ability to engage with their government, saying:
“The preponderance of the evidence proved that Black voters’ participation in the political process is impaired by historic and continuing socio-economic disparities in education, employment, housing, health and criminal justice.”
While the judge did not specifically cite prison gerrymandering in her ruling, it is an issue that makes the inequalities at the heart of the case even worse. Prison gerrymandering is a problem created because the Census Bureau counts incarcerated people as residents of the wrong place — a prison cell — rather than their actual homes. When state governments then use the Bureau’s data to draw new legislative maps during their redistricting process, they inadvertently give residents who live closest to prisons greater political clout at the expense of everyone else.
When the Louisiana legislature convenes to draw new legislative districts to comply with the Judge’s order, its maps should address the injustice of prison gerrymandering.
Prison gerrymandering diminishes Black political representation in Louisiana
Louisiana is the incarceration capital of the world, locking up not only a greater share of its residents than any other state in the country but also more than any nation on the planet. So it should come as no surprise that prison gerrymandering has stark consequences in the state.
A unique dataset, which we gathered with the help of Louisiana-based Voice of the Experienced and Redistricting Data Hub, gives us a more precise look at how this plays out.1 Most importantly, we can see that incarcerated people come from all over the state. This matters because under the current flawed way the Census Bureau treats incarcerated people, the 26,000+ people in state custody are counted in just a handful of state prisons, dramatically inflating the population of those communities — and, with it, their political clout.
This data shows that prison gerrymandering robs nearly every state legislative district and its residents of some of their political voice. This political clout is then given to those districts that contain prisons.
While nearly every community is harmed by prison gerrymandering, that pain is not felt equally. Louisiana has stark racial disparities in its prisons. Black residents account for 32% of the state’s population, but they account for 66% of the people in state prisons.
Slideshow 1. Racial disparities in Louisiana prisons are stark. Learn more by visiting our Louisiana state profile page.
With such dramatic disparities in incarceration in the state, it is clear that prison gerrymandering is undermining Black political representation in Louisiana.
Prison gerrymandering gives two majority-white districts a particularly loud voice in government
Because of prison gerrymandering, people in Louisiana who happen to live close to state prisons get more political clout at the expense of every other resident of the state.
In Louisiana, two majority-white districts particularly benefit from this dynamic. First is House District 22, which contains a federal prison in Pollock. The other is House District 18, home to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola Prison.
In each of these places, incarcerated people make up more than 11% of the district population. As a result, 89 actual residents of these districts have the same political clout as 100 residents of any district in the state without a prison.
Two majority-white districts in Louisiana benefit the most from prison gerrymandering, at the expense of every other district in the state.
Percentage of the district population that is incarcerated
Percentage of the district population that is white (non-Hispanic)
House District 22
11.73%
62%
House District 18
11.36%
62%
Addressing prison gerrymandering will correct this imbalance and ensure that residents of these districts get the same voice in government — no more and no less — as every other resident of the state.
Louisiana’s embrace of failed, punitive criminal legal system policies shows why prison gerrymandering matters
At its core, the failure of Louisiana to address prison gerrymandering is an issue of political representation. However, this isn’t simply an academic exercise about ensuring everyone has an equal voice. It has real and dramatic consequences. To see this, you have to look no further than the recently ended special session of the Louisiana legislature.
The state’s new governor called the special session under the guise of focusing on crime despite the evidence that crime is at its lowest levels in roughly 60 years. During the session, lawmakers passed a slew of regressive policies that will increase prison populations and make the criminal legal system more punitive, including effectively eliminating parole, trying more young people as adults, and expanding the use of the death penalty.
It is reasonable to conclude that lawmakers who benefit politically from prison gerrymandering and the state’s large prison population have a strong incentive to protect and even grow this advantage by supporting the type of punitive criminal legal system policies passed during the special session. On the other hand, lawmakers who represent districts that have large numbers of residents in state prisons are more likely to seek solutions to the root causes of incarceration, such as poverty and untreated mental health and substance use issues. This conclusion was borne out during the special session when the two lawmakers who represent House Districts 22 and 18 — and benefit most from prison gerrymandering — supported all of the new draconian changes to the criminal legal system.
Addressing prison gerrymandering will help to disrupt this incentive toward bad policy and ensure every resident gets an equal say in government.
Now is the time for Louisiana to end prison gerrymandering
Eighteen states — including “red” states like Montana, “blue” states like New York, and “purple” states like Maine — have recognized the injustice of prison gerrymandering and rejected the flawed Census data. Instead, they took it upon themselves to correct the redistricting data to provide more equal representation to their residents. Progress on this issue has been so swift that the staunchly bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures recently called the movement to end prison gerrymandering “the fastest-growing trend in redistricting.”
Louisiana should join this rapidly growing list.
We don’t yet know when the legislature will take action in response to the court ruling, and the judge did not set a clear timeframe for when they must act. However, when they do, their maps should address the problem of prison gerrymandering. Failure to act would mean that residents of the state — particularly Black residents — will continue to have their political representation diminished until at least 2031.
Footnotes
This analysis only includes data on the people incarcerated in state prisons in Louisiana. It does not include information on people held at the two federal prisons in the state. ↩
The 2020 redistricting cycle was a turning point in the effort to end prison gerrymandering. Fixing the Census Bureau’s flawed way of counting incarcerated people was once considered a niche issue, but after 2020 is now “the fastest-growing trend in redistricting,” according to the fiercely bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures.
We previously looked at the experiences of states that have addressed prison gerrymandering after the 2020 Census. We wanted to also see what happened in states that haven’t fixed this problem to see what it tells us about how this issue plays out across the country as we look toward the 2030 count.
To do this, we examined the ten state legislative districts1 where, according to Census data, people held at correctional facilities account for the largest percentage of the district population.
These ten worst prison gerrymanders in the nation show the problem is increasingly harming residents of rural states and defying some of the preconceived notions about partisan impacts.
The 10 Worst Prison Gerrymanders After 2020 Redistricting
State
District
Percent of district’s Census population incarcerated
What party holds the seat?
New Hampshire
House District Merrimack 17
49.5%
Democratic
West Virginia
House District 83
18.4%
Republican
Mississippi
House District 47
17.7%
Democratic
Mississippi
House District 68
16.6%
Democratic
Oklahoma
House District 56
14.0%
Republican
Wyoming
House District 2
13.6%
Republican
Mississippi
House District 26
13.6%
Democratic
Arkansas
House District 65
13.5%
Democratic
West Virginia
House District 45
12.6%
Republican
South Carolina
House District 73
12.0%
Democratic
Rural states bear the burden of the Census Bureau’s error
This analysis shows that prison gerrymandering is a problem increasingly harming residents in some of the most rural states. While some might be tempted to chalk this up to the political dynamics of those states — we explain later in this piece why this seems increasingly unlikely — the truth is this is likely more a reflection of the Census Bureau shifting its responsibilities to over-burdened state governments and the series of trade-offs this forces states to make.
Prison gerrymandering is a problem created by the Census Bureau. Every ten years, it erroneously counts incarcerated people at the location of the facility they happen to be on Census Day rather than in their home communities. When state and local governments use this data for redistricting, they inadvertently give communities that contain prisons greater political clout at the expense of everyone else.
If states want to draw fairer districts by ending prison gerrymandering, they have to take on the task of fixing the flawed Census Bureau data to count incarcerated people at their true homes. This takes time, effort, and money, three rare and valuable commodities during redistricting.
To be clear, fixing prison gerrymandering is not a hugely expensive endeavor.2 But state budgets are a series of trade-offs and compromises. If lawmakers have the chance to spend even a few thousand dollars on direct services to their residents or can use that money to fix the Census Bureau’s mistake that caused prison gerrymandering, which do you think they’re likely to choose?
The experience of Montana, a state that has addressed prison gerrymandering despite its comparably small budget, shows the budgetary tricks or luck that states have to rely on to fix this Census Bureau mistake. During the 2020 redistricting cycle, commissioners in that state were unanimous in their desire to address prison gerrymandering, but it almost did not happen because they didn’t have the money to adjust the Census redistricting data to count incarcerated people at home. Ultimately, they could only implement this change because COVID-related restrictions meant that they could use money initially allocated for travel instead to end prison gerrymandering.
Some might be tempted to ask, “Why should the Census Bureau take on this effort instead of the places that want to change the data?” The simple fact is that the Census Bureau has a duty to provide states with redistricting data fit for use — a duty that the emerging consensus among states shows they are not meeting. State and local governments have been loud and clear, they want the Bureau to fix this problem.
Roughly half of all U.S. residents now live in a city, county, or state that has ended prison gerrymandering, with more almost certain to join them before the 2030 redistricting cycle. The Bureau’s stubborn refusal to change how it counts incarcerated people is a liability for a rapidly growing swath of the country and a disincentive for more places to join their ranks.
Additionally, it is important to remember that apart from any concerns about taking on additional burdens and redistricting time, states can only partially solve the problem. Prison gerrymandering is a national problem that crosses jurisdictional boundaries. No city, county, or state can completely fix this issue on its own. Only the Census Bureau can fully solve this problem nationwide.
Prison gerrymandering is not a partisan issue
Redistricting is notoriously contentious, with politicians working to gain leverage for their party in state houses.
While some have sought to paint the effort to end prison gerrymandering as a partisan tool in those fights, this analysis firmly busts that myth. These data show that both parties are harmed by prison gerrymandering.
Of these ten districts, six are districts controlled by Democrats, while Republicans control four. Notably, the district most distorted by a prison, New Hampshire’s Merrimack 17, is currently held by a Democrat. Prison gerrymandering distorts this district so severely that residents there have twice the political clout of residents of any other district in the state without a prison.
This is the latest piece of evidence that prison gerrymandering reform regularly defies traditional political expectations:
More than 200 rural city and county governments — many in some of the most conservative parts of the country — have recognized how prison gerrymandering harms their residents and have taken it upon themselves to fix Census data to address prison gerrymandering.
This analysis makes clear that neither political party is a guaranteed winner in prison gerrymandering. But, the clear loser in prison gerrymandering is every resident who doesn’t live in a legislative district with a prison.
What does this data tell us about 2030?
The 2030 Census may seem far away, but the Bureau has already begun planning for the count. It will likely decide where to count incarcerated people in the next two to three years.
This new analysis, which shows that the burden to correct flawed Census data increasingly falls on rural states and that prison gerrymandering is an issue that defies traditional partisan assumptions, should weigh heavily on their decision.
As we wait for the Census Bureau to decide, state lawmakers — particularly in these states with the worst prison gerrymanders — should start laying the groundwork to fix this problem should the Bureau fail to act. This means passing legislation now to ensure the state has the data and expertise it needs to successfully implement reform to end prison gerrymandering during the 2030 redistricting cycle.
Footnotes
This analysis is based on districts as they stood after the initial redistricting period after the 2020 Census. Some of these states may have adjusted their districts since then. ↩
