by Aleks Kajstura, Legal Director, Prison Policy Initiative
Standard Deviations blog posts represent the views of the author/organization, but not necessarily those of The Census Project.
Last month the Census Bureau released its View from the States report – a collection of states’ feedback about the Bureau’s 2020 redistricting data program. The report is important because it serves as a starting point for planning the 2030 Census and subsequent redistricting data, which states use to draw districts and ensure equal representation in the legislatures.
One of the main complaints from the states this decade was prison gerrymandering – a problem created because the Census Bureau incorrectly counts incarcerated people as residents of their prison cells rather than their home communities. When states use this flawed Census data to draw new districts, they inadvertently give residents of districts with prisons greater political clout than all other state residents.
States have been tackling prison gerrymandering on their own, as the Bureau’s report points out: “…states representing approximately one-half of the U.S. population now have statutory or policy requirements to reallocate specific populations from where they are counted in the decennial census to an alternate location.” In plain English, that means nearly half of the US population now lives in a place that corrects redistricting data they receive from the Census to count incarcerated people at home. These include deep “blue” states like California, “purple” states like Maine and Pennsylvania, and deep “red” states like Montana – where prison gerrymandering-reform legislation received wide bipartisan support.
We break down the 60-page report to highlight states’ dissatisfaction with the Census Bureau for counting incarcerated people in the wrong place and examine the progress and backsliding in the way it publishes population data for correctional facilities.
Read the full Prison Policy Initiative analysis.
