If the Census Bureau truly values accuracy, it should count incarcerated people at home

The Census Bureau’s current method of counting people in prison and jail is prone to errors with sizable consequences. Counting incarcerated people at home can produce more accurate data.

by Aleks Kajstura, October 30, 2024

It is no secret that the Census Bureau counts incarcerated people in the wrong place — a prison or jail cell — instead of in their actual communities. As a result, when states and local governments use census data to draw new political boundaries during their redistricting process, they inadvertently give residents of districts with correctional facilities greater political clout at the expense of everyone else — a problem known as prison gerrymandering.

For two decades, we’ve worked to fix this problem, but it isn’t the only way that the Census Bureau gets it wrong when counting incarcerated people. The Bureau also routinely mistakenly and unknowingly places prisons and jails in the wrong location in its data or dramatically miscounts them, further distorting political representation across the country. This problem exacerbates prison gerrymandering and warrants further scrutiny.

We examined 2020 Census data to better understand the impact of this often overlooked error. We found that it is not a rare mistake; it is perpetuated across the country and across the decades. And the solution is clear: by counting incarcerated people as residents of their homes the Census Bureau will minimize technical inaccuracies while also ending prison gerrymandering.

The Bureau is wrong to count incarcerated people as if they were residents of correctional facilities

Before looking at the impact of the Census Bureau misplacing or miscounting entire prisons and jails, it is worth revisiting its flawed reasoning for counting incarcerated people at those facilities in the first place.

The Bureau says that it determines where to count people using its “usual residence rule” which says it counts them where they live and sleep most of the time. In attempting to justify its decision to count incarcerated people in prisons and jails, it argued, “counting prisoners anywhere other than the facility would be less consistent with the concept of usual residence since the majority of people in prisons live and sleep most of the time at the prison.”

As we’ve noted before, this is simply not true. Short stays in prison are common. Even people incarcerated away from home for a year or longer do not stay in one place; they are usually moved between multiple facilities. While they are being shuffled between facilities, incarcerated people generally maintain a usual residence elsewhere; their pre-incarceration home remains the only actual stable address. There are plenty more 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.

The Bureau’s flawed way of counting incarcerated people makes its other mistakes even worse

We often think of the census as a gold standard for population data. And while it is, on the whole, fairly accurate, no matter how careful you are, perfection is not possible when attempting to count over 330 million people.

However, when the Bureau counts an entire prison or jail — which can account for hundreds or thousands of people — in the wrong place, it can have a big impact.

The Bureau routinely misplaces correctional facilities

During the 2020 count, the Census Bureau counted at least one prison or jail in every state in the wrong place. Most of the populations counted erroneously were small, but occasionally, the census reported hundreds or thousands of incarcerated people in the wrong place.

Here are just a few examples from a single state, New York.

The Census Bureau didn’t count any people at Adirondack Correction Facility — a place that holds bout 300 incarcerated people. However, roughly the same number of incarcerated people were counted in a state forest about 175 miles away.¹ Our best guess is the Bureau accidentally counted this facility in the wrong place.

Woodbourne Correctional Facility appears to have been counted twice — once in its actual location,² and also in the empty field next door.³

Empty fields are a common place for the Census Bureau to mistakenly report correctional populations. In Wyoming County, N.Y., rather than counting them in the facility where they were confined, the Bureau counted nearly a thousand incarcerated people in a field,⁴ and another group of over 800 was reported just across the street from their facility’s location — also in empty fields. This is a perennial problem with the census. In the 2000 Census, the Bureau reported nearly 1800 incarcerated people — likely from the Wyoming Correctional facility in a random field halfway across the county.⁵

These examples are all just from a single state, and these problems are not confined to New York. The scope of the problem becomes clear when considering that these miscounts and misallocations exist in every state.⁶

Some might be tempted to argue that the Census Bureau might make similar mistakes if it counted incarcerated people in their home communities rather than counting them at the prison or jail. This would almost certainly happen. Despite its best intentions, the Bureau is not perfect and will make mistakes.

The difference is the size and scale of the mistakes. If the Bureau places a prison that holds hundreds of people in the wrong place, it can severely skew the counts. However, if it counts a single or even several incarcerated people in the wrong place, it would have a negligible impact on political representation and the underlying Census data.

The Bureau’s mistakes create incorrect race and ethnicity data

When the Bureau counts even a single facility in the wrong place, it drops thousands of people into an arbitrary location. This can flip the race characteristics of thousands of people, as the Bureau did in reporting 2020 Census populations for the blocks containing Angola Prison in Louisiana.

The prison accounts for a third of the Parish’s census population, so any population data reported for the prison will heavily influence the demographic picture of the parish. The 2020 Census counted over 4,000 Black people incarcerated at Angola as if they were white. At that time, white people actually accounted for less than a quarter of Angola’s population. Not only does such an error further distort the demographic data of the surrounding parish, but it blatantly obscures the disproportionate toll that mass incarceration places on Black communities.

Furthermore, by creating a false picture of the population in a facility, it also makes it harder for states ending prison gerrymandering to comply with voting rights laws that require accurate race and ethnicity data for drawing districts.

Misplacing prisons & jails exacerbates prison gerrymandering and diminishes trust in the Census Bureau

The Census Bureau’s current approach — counting incarcerated people as if they were residents of a correctional facility — creates inaccurate pictures of communities across the country and leads to prison gerrymandering. This problem is made worse by the Bureau’s persistent, multi-decennial errors that place correctional facilities in random other locations. A single error (and it’s never limited to single errors) haphazardly injects hundreds or thousands of people into a random community’s redistricting data.

Incarcerated people and their families lose trust in the Census Bureau when they don’t believe they are counted in the right place or that they are counted at all.

At a time of increasing distrust in the census, the Bureau should ensure that communities view its data as accurate and feel represented in the process and final results.

The most accurate and equitable solution is to allow incarcerated people to self-enumerate.

Officials at the Census Bureau may worry about how they would implement a change to count incarcerated people in their home communities. The good news for them is they already have a process in place that they use for all other people in the U.S.: simply allow incarcerated people to fill out their census forms themselves — or, as the Bureau calls it, “self-enumeration ” — rather than relying on the facility administrators to provide the date for them. In fact, this is a solution that was already part of the Census Bureau’s plan for the 2020 Census, giving more facility types this option than in 2010.⁷

States that currently reallocate incarcerated people back home in their redistricting data must now rely on their internal facility or correctional agency records to access home address information. These records are sometimes incomplete. By allowing incarcerated people to self-enumerate, the Bureau would provide states with more accurate and complete data and alleviate state officials of a significant burden.

Not only would this change allow incarcerated people to provide their addresses directly, it would also improve race and ethnicity reporting. Currently, correctional facilities don’t report race and ethnicity data in accordance with census standards. For example, in 2020, correctional facilities failed to report Hispanic status for over a quarter of the people they reported. Moving to self-enumeration would mean a more complete and accurate picture of the demographics of people who are incarcerated.

Of course, despite this, there would still be some non-responses for various reasons, just as people on the outside fail to participate in the census for various reasons. In these circumstances, facility records could still be used to fill in any blanks left after everyone had the opportunity to self-enumerate, ensuring that the 2030 Census is more accurate than prior decades.

If the Bureau chooses not to allow self-enumeration to collect home address data, the Census Bureau can follow the limited-but-tested processes used by the states and rely solely on the data already in the records collected by correctional agencies. Information missing from the records can either be imputed, as the census already does for race and ethnicity data, or, as some states do, continue to count people at the facility if all other efforts fail.

The states have pioneered a variety of paths to counting incarcerated people at home, and the Census Bureau has many more tools, giving it the ability to go far beyond state efforts and create an even more accurate enumeration. At the very least, the Census Bureau can replicate state efforts to count incarcerated people at home.

If the Census Bureau wants to be accurate, it should try something different: count incarcerated people at home

The Bureau’s current way of counting incarcerated people isn’t working. Not only does it dramatically distort political representation, but persistent errors in this data create redistricting chaos far outside the prison walls.

Counting people at home would produce census data that is, on the whole, a more accurate reflection of the population. There are concerns that counting people at home will lead to some inaccuracies because of missing home address data in facility records or non-response from incarcerated people asked to fill out the census themselves. However, the current methods used by the Census Bureau have already resulted in serious inaccuracies in the data. By attempting to count incarcerated people at home, the Census Bureau would be abandoning a seriously flawed status quo and aiming for a more accurate census.

Counting incarcerated people at home is crucial to ensuring equal representation, particularly for communities disproportionately impacted by mass incarceration. In fact, nearly half the US population is now living in a place that has rejected the Bureau’s redistricting data in order to avoid prison gerrymandering. It is time for the Bureau to count incarcerated people at home in order to create a more accurate 2030 Census.

Resource Spotlight: Which local governments engage in or avoid prison gerrymandering?

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.

by Aleks Kajstura, September 24, 2024

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:

• The first lists local governments that avoid prison gerrymandering and
• The other lists those that still engage in prison gerrymandering.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

Advocates to Census Bureau: Stop making it harder for states to end prison gerrymandering

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

by Aleks Kajstura, August 26, 2024

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.

For more details, check out the full letter here (PDF).

A record number of city councils and county commissions tackled prison gerrymandering after the 2020 Census

While the Census Bureau dawdles, local governments continue to address prison gerrymandering in their own backyard, despite limitations.

by Aleks Kajstura, July 30, 2024

Because of their relatively small size, city and county governments often experience the most distortive impacts of prison gerrymandering. When drawing districts in these communities, a single prison can easily account for an entire city council or county commission district, making it impossible for officials to draw fair districts. So it should come as no surprise that, while state government efforts to address the practice receive most of the attention, the movement to end prison gerrymandering started and has been most successful at the local government level, in mostly small, rural, conservative cities and counties. The 2020 redistricting cycle continued this pattern.

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. Progress in addressing this problem has been so swift in recent years that the National Conference of State Legislatures recently called the movement to end prison gerrymandering “the fastest-growing trend in redistricting.”

The distortions caused by prison gerrymandering have real-world implications in these communities. It gives some residents a louder voice in the political process, which means local government often prioritizes the issues they want addressed — whether it be deciding which potholes get filled, where to expand sewer services, or which parks to improve — over the needs of residents who live in all other parts of the town or county.

Hundreds of local governments ended prison gerrymandering on their own, with still new ones joining their ranks this decade

In addition to the hundreds of cities and counties that avoided prison gerrymandering after the 2000 and 2010 Censuses (decades when zero and two states, respectively, tackled the issue), we identified an additional 21 local governments¹ scattered across 10 states that addressed the problem for the first time after the 2020 Census.²

It is important to note that this does not represent the complete list of communities that addressed prison gerrymandering; it is a list of places we identified that have done so for the first time this decade — and an incomplete list at that. That’s because many of the laws passed in recent years ending prison gerrymandering in state legislative districts also apply to city and county districts. For example, California’s law, which ended the practice, applies to local governments, too, meaning the communities containing the 34 state prisons and 114 local jails also avoided the practice. As a result, our analysis certainly underrepresents the number of local governments that no longer take part in prison gerrymandering.

Local governments got creative to avoid prison gerrymandering

To avoid prison gerrymandering, communities found creative solutions to overcome the Census Bureau’s flawed counting methods. Regardless of which method they employ, they all led to the same result: districts more representative of the community’s actual population.

There are several common ways local governments avoided prison gerrymandering:

• Adjusting their redistricting data to remove the out-of-town population counted at the prison;
• “Overpopulating” the district with the prison so that it contains the same number of true residents as every other district in the city/county;
• Cutting holes in the maps around the prison to exclude the prison population altogether;
• Trying to split prison facilities across multiple districts to even out the impact.

In addition, a handful of communities avoid prison gerrymandering by forgoing redistricting altogether, a particularly common practice when a new prison has been built in the area since it last drew new district lines. Communities can maintain equal representation without redistricting if their population outside of the prison has not changed. We’ve discovered a number of places that have chosen not to redistrict because the only significant change in the total Census population is the correctional population.

It is important to remember, though, even when local governments can solve their own prison gerrymandering problems, their jurisdiction ends at their city or county line. While they can ensure that prison isn’t included in their redistricting data, they can’t actually count incarcerated people in their home communities, meaning those people often aren’t included anywhere for redistricting purposes.

Some local governments face unnecessary obstacles

Even as more governments take on the task of ending prison gerrymandering in their local districts, some face arcane state rules that turn these simple reforms into complex mazes.

In Wisconsin, for example, leaders in Juneau County recognized prison gerrymandering was a problem and wanted to fix it, so they sought guidance from the state on how to do that but were told their hands were tied. They learned an outdated and confusing 1981 attorney general’s opinion directed local governments to draw new district lines without excluding incarcerated people. It requires local governments to take part in prison gerrymandering, even though they didn’t want to. Wisconsin’s attorney general can and should issue a new opinion that gives local governments the freedom to finally fix this problem, but until he does, their hands are tied.

Rural municipal and county districts still suffer from the largest impact

Despite this progress, there are still some communities that face huge impacts of prison gerrymandering.

Local governments’ efforts to end prison gerrymandering are sometimes stymied by state governments, such as in Wisconsin. But even when state governments reverse course to support avoiding prison gerrymandering, some counties stay adrift on their previous heading. For example, since 2016, Tennessee has explicitly allowed (Tenn. Code Ann. S 5-1-111) counties to deviate from the Census population to avoid prison gerrymandering. Since then three counties (Hardeman County, Johnson County, Morgan County) that had engaged in prison gerrymandering have stopped doing so. Unfortunately, most counties impacted by prison gerrymandering in the state continue to use unadjusted Census data for redistricting and, as a result, draw some of the most unequal districts in the country.

As a result, Tennessee, along with Wisconsin — which, as we explained above, prohibits local governments from ending prison gerrymandering — account for six out of the eight cities or counties in the country where correctional facilities make up at least half of local government district

Rural residents would benefit from the Census Bureau solving the problem

Despite the progress made in recent years to address the problem, residents of rural communities continue to be disproportionately harmed by prison gerrymandering and stand to uniquely benefit if the Census Bureau were to solve the problem.

There are three reasons for this:

1. As we explained in this briefing, because of their small size, rural cities and towns that contain prisons often have their local government districts extremely distorted by prison populations.
2. Rural state governments have been slower to adopt statewide reforms to address prison gerrymandering. As a result, our analysis earlier this year found most of the worst state legislative prison gerrymanders are located in rural areas. This analysis also shows the issue defies many preconceived notions about the partisan impact of the problem, with Democrats controlling six of the most gerrymandered districts, while Republicans control four.
3. Mass incarceration is no longer just a problem in urban areas. Our analysis of where incarcerated people come from found that rural areas often have the highest incarceration rates in their state. These increasing incarceration rates mean that while some rural communities see their political boundaries dramatically distorted by prison gerrymandering, others lose political clout because of the problem.

If, in 2030, the Census Bureau chose to count incarcerated people in their home communities instead of in prison and jail cells, all three of these problems would be solved for rural communities. This change would save these communities time and money, ensure they didn’t lose political clout to prison gerrymandering, and help communities that contain prisons create local government boundaries that accurately reflect their true population.

Looking toward 2030

Roughly half of all U.S. residents now live in a city, county, or state that has ended prison gerrymandering. Even as more local governments and states address the issue, they can only do so much. 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. As it begins to plan the 2030 count, it should finally listen to the growing consensus among state and local governments and end prison gerrymandering across the country.

Grab our one-pager about this issue at https://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/factsheets/national/local_impact.pdf

2030 Census Advisory Committee flags prison gerrymandering issues for the Census Bureau

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.

by Aleks Kajstura, July 29, 2024

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.

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 Census Bureau has a persistent undercount of Black and Latino communities — communities that have also historically been hardest hit by mass incarceration — meaning that counting incarcerated people as if they resided at facilities far from home compounds the Bureau’s undercounts of their home communities.

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:

1. 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.
2. The new methods of privacy protections (“disclosure avoidance”) that make it harder for states to adjust their own redistricting data to count people at home.

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.

National civil rights coalition gives Census Bureau 5 reasons to end prison gerrymandering

National coalition of more than 240 organization urges the Bureau to count incarcerate people at home.

by Aleks Kajstura, June 28, 2024

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 plethora of reasons it should do so, the letter focuses on 5 key points:

1. The residence rules must reflect the real-life circumstances of incarcerated persons and the needs of the states and communities in which they live.
2. 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.
3. Incarcerated people are not part of the social and economic fabric of the communities surrounding the facilities where they are serving their sentences.
4. 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.
5. Equity requires counting incarcerated people at home.

For details on all 5 points, check out the letter (or PDF).

States were incredibly successful at reallocating incarcerated people to their home addresses in 2020: A review of the data

We explore state redistricting reports to show that, despite facing immense challenges, states were remarkably successful ending prison gerrymandering after the 2020 Census.

by Mike Wessler and Aleks Kajstura, June 10, 2024

During the 2020 redistricting cycle, more than a dozen states took it upon themselves to do what the Census Bureau has refused: end prison gerrymandering. Through their redistricting process, they worked to unwind the flawed way the Bureau counts incarcerated people — as residents of a prison cell — and instead count them where they actually live, creating legislative districts that more accurately reflect actual resident populations.

Prison gerrymandering is a problem created because the Census Bureau counts incarcerated people as residents of a prison cell rather than at their true communities. When states then use Census data during their redistricting process, they artificially inflate the population of prison communities and give them a larger voice in government.

With such rapid growth in the movement to address prison gerrymandering, it is natural to wonder: How successful were these states? How many people were they able to count at their home addresses?

It is an important question with huge implications; 19 states are already poised to adjust their redistricting data to address prison gerrymandering in the 2030 redistricting cycle. These questions can help states evaluate how they can do better during the 2030 redistricting cycle. It can guide states that haven’t yet adopted anti-prison gerrymandering laws but are considering them. Finally, it can illustrate how states are limited in their ability to solve this problem in ways the Census Bureau is not.

To answer these questions, we reviewed redistricting reports and data from 13 states that addressed prison gerrymandering after the 2020 census to understand how many people in state prisons they attempted to count in their home communities and how many they were able to reallocate successfully.

Perfection isn’t possible, so it’s not the goal

Before diving into our analysis, it is important to remember that it is impossible and unrealistic for states to successfully reallocate everyone in their prisons to their home communities.

There are three primary reasons why a state can’t count an incarcerated person at their home address:

1. The person’s last address is in a different state: States don’t have the power to reallocate people across state lines, so they cannot count people from out of state in their home community.
2. The state has decided not to reallocate an incarcerated person for a policy-based reason: Unfortunately, some states have implemented arbitrary limitations on their reforms by excluding certain incarcerated people from being counted in their home communities. For example, Rhode Island did the mapping work for all people incarcerated in the state correctional facilities. However, it chose to count incarcerated people with more than two years left on their sentence at the prison location in the redistricting data. While we and other organizations think this is misguided, it is the choice policymakers have made, so redistricting staff could not count them in their home community.
3. Erroneous or missing data: State redistricting officials often rely on their Department of Corrections (DOC) to get address data for incarcerated people. Generally, that data contains everything they need to implement their reforms. However, sometimes data is missing or erroneous. Apart from typos and other record-keeping errors in home address data, there are a few situations where home addresses are missing altogether. For example, if an incarcerated person indicated they were unhoused before coming to prison, the DOC will likely leave the address field blank or note “homeless.” This may be an appropriate response for prison staff, but it creates problems for redistricting officials.¹While there are some steps redistricting officials can take to reduce this number, it often takes time, which is something they don’t have much of.

These limitations make it impossible for a state to reallocate 100% of people in its prisons to their home communities, so when they evaluate their success, they shouldn’t grade themselves against perfection. Instead, they should ask themselves: “Of the people it was possible to reallocate, how many did we reallocate?”

How did states do?

For our analysis, we looked at two key numbers:

1. The state’s success rate for reallocating people that it was possible to count at home.²
2. The total percentage of people in state prisons counted at their home address.

Our analysis ³ shows that most states did remarkably well. This is noteworthy because 2020 was a notoriously difficult redistricting cycle, in which Census data was delayed, and many states adopted prison gerrymandering reform laws late in the decade.

Of the 13 states we analyzed, 10 published their methodology. Nine out of 10 were able to reallocate at least 80% of people with addresses that met the states’ criteria, with Nevada being the lone exception. Impressively, California successfully mapped every address that it attempted.

States were so successful that even in two of the three states where we could not fully analyze the success rate because they didn’t publish their methodology — Virginia and Washington — we can tell that roughly 90% of their total state prison population was successfully reallocated to their home communities. Importantly, like Rhode Island (which we explained above), Pennsylvania also made a policy choice to exclude certain incarcerated people from these reforms, instantly lowering the portion of its prison population that could be counted at home.

Getting to 100%

While states have done a remarkable job implementing these reforms, every incarcerated person should be counted in their home communities for redistricting purposes. What can government officials do to accomplish this?

1. Start collecting, assessing, and cleaning data early: Getting good data from the Department of Corrections is critical to successfully implementing reforms. That’s why state redistricting officials should work with that agency now to ensure it is collecting the data they’ll need during the next redistricting cycle. Similarly, states that haven’t yet addressed prison gerrymandering should adopt and implement policies to do so now. This will ensure prisons collect and maintain high-quality address data for people they incarcerate.
2. Don’t adopt arbitrary limitations on reforms: When adopting anti-prison gerrymandering reforms, states should include all incarcerated people, regardless of the length of their sentence. Even if a person is likely to spend decades behind bars, they’re still not a resident of the legislative district that contains the prison ⁴ — they don’t have ties to that community, they don’t call it home, and if they have a problem that they want lawmakers to fix they’re not likely to call the legislator who represents the prison but rather the elected officials from their home community — so the town containing the prison shouldn’t get an outsized voice in government simply because the facility happens to be located there.
3. The Census Bureau must change its policies: Even if states do everything in their power to address prison gerrymandering, there will still be some incarcerated people that they can’t count in their home districts, most frequently those who come from different states. Similarly, but not covered in this analysis, if a state contains a federal prison, redistricting officials cannot reallocate those incarcerated people to their home communities. The Census Bureau is the only government entity with the power to address this problem completely and across state lines.

This analysis shows that states have been incredibly successful in implementing reforms to address prison gerrymandering. History suggests that if the Census Bureau fails to resolve this problem, states will do even better during the 2030 redistricting cycle. This should give confidence to places considering similar reforms and motivate them to take action now.

Ultimately, though, to fully address prison gerrymandering, the Census Bureau should listen to the growing bipartisan consensus among states and adjust its policies to end prison gerrymandering nationwide.

Minnesota ends prison gerrymandering

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.

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.

Most incarcerated people will return home; the Census Bureau should count them there

Using an incarcerated person’s last known home address when redistricting gives the most accurate picture of where they reside.

by Aleks Kajstura, May 14, 2024

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:

1. Black and Hispanic people are consistently overrepresented in prisons
2. In most states, prisons are built in rural, largely-white communities.

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.

We looked at the state’s probation and parole data for 2020 and compared it to the state’s 2020 redistricting data that counted incarcerated people at home.¹

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

Over 60% of people in state prison are held at least 100 miles from their homes. Importantly, according to the Census Bureau, 80% of people in the U.S. who are of similar median age to the incarcerated population (roughly 30-years-old) still live within 100 miles of where they grew up.

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.

Even people incarcerated away from home for a year or longer are not in one place. They move between multiple facilities. Nationally, 75% of people serve time in more than one prison facility, 12% of people serve time in at least five facilities before returning home. While they are being shuffled between facilities, incarcerated people maintain a usual residence elsewhere; their pre-incarceration home remains the only actual stable address.

A home address is the most accurate option

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.

Grab our one-pager about this issue at https://www.prisonpolicy.org/factsheets/home_addresses_one_pager.pdf.

Changes to federal race & ethnicity standards give states an opportunity to improve data for prison gerrymandering reform

States should consider new race and ethnicity standards when preparing to implement prison gerrymandering reform in the 2030 redistricting cycle

by Danielle Squillante, April 29, 2024

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?