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.

Can you help us continue the fight? Thank you.

—Peter Wagner, Executive DirectorDonate
Sections
Introduction
Section 1: Getting started
Section 2: Accessing Census data
Section 3: Calculating the impact on districts
Section 4: Repairing your democracy, now and in the future
Tools
Correctional Facility Locator (2020)
Correctional Facility Locator (2010)
Correctional Facility Locator (2000)
Vote dilution calculator
2020 Worksheet [DOC] a single worksheet updated for use after the 2020 Census to determine if a county included or excluded the incarcerated population.
Worksheets [DOC] with all of the tables used in this toolkit
Appendices
Handling lettered blocks
Determining whether prisoners were included or excluded from districts with known populations.
District population deviations & split prisons
Weighted Voting

Democracy Toolkit:
Vote Dilution Calculator

We have found that the most effective way to explain vote dilution is to show it in terms of groups of people being valued differently. This tool will help you translate percentages into examples.

Fill out the fields below for the district with the largest prison population and we'll suggest a simple way to explain the impact:

District information:

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