Prison gerrymandering offers illusion of political representation

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In Anamosa, Iowa, Danny Young won a City Council seat in 2005 with two write-in votes: one from his wife and the other from his neighbor. Young’s district, Ward 2, was reported to consist of 1,400 people, a comparable figure to other wards. However, because the U.S. Census Bureau counts incarcerated people as part of the district where they’re imprisoned instead of the district in which they lived prior to incarceration, Ward 2’s population was artificially inflated by 1,300 incarcerated people who could not vote and did not count as constituents. Thus, the 58 people in Ward 2 who were not incarcerated wielded nearly 25 times the political influence. 

This asymmetry is a consequence of prison gerrymandering, an insidious form of disenfranchisement that continues to occur in the U.S. 

Every 10 years, states redraw their electoral districts using the data the Census Bureau collects. Since 1790, the Census Bureau has used the “usual residence” rule, which states that individuals should be counted at the residence where they usually spend a majority of their time. The rule includes specific provisions for “special populations.” For example, in the 1992 case of Franklin v. Massachusetts, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that military personnel serving abroad must be counted in areas where they have social, economic, and political ties. 

For incarcerated populations, this special provision is revoked. 

Instead, incarcerated people, who typically serve less than 10-year sentences and are barred from voting in 48 U.S. states, are counted in the districts where their correctional facility is located, which are often rural areas where they do not have any personal ties. In fact, more than 70% of prisons built after the 1970s are in predominantly white, rural neighborhoods, while incarcerated individuals are most likely from urban or historically marginalized communities (i.e., “redlined” or “blockbusted” neighborhoods). 

The pervasiveness of prison gerrymandering becomes even more concerning when we consider how structural racism is tightly embedded within the carceral system. Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution created the Census and decreed that enslaved people be counted as three-fifths of a person. Enslaved people were also considered property and not citizens worthy of representation in legislative assemblies. Since the Census was established, we have witnessed over time how slavery evolved to form the basis of mass incarceration.

Since 1970, the incarceration rate in the U.S. has increased by 500%, with nearly 2 million people confined in local, state, or federal correctional facilities. The “war on drugs” and “tough on crime” policies have played a significant role in the exponential rise of incarceration rates, especially among Black people. Despite making up only 14% of the total U.S. population, Black people represent 42% of the total incarcerated population—a rate six times higher than that of their white counterparts. A 2021 dashboard on prison gerrymandering shows that in all U.S. states, Black people comprise a greater share of incarcerated populations compared with non-incarcerated population, at times by a ratio of 5 to 1.

The Census count for incarcerated people has funneled both financial and political resources away from disinvested communities. Upon their release, incarcerated people return to communities that have lost out on having the appropriate political representation, which ultimately affects the resources those communities need and have access to. This is because Census data is also used to determine the amount of federal funding counties, cities, and states receive for public assistance programs. 

In 2021, the Census Bureau highlighted that 353 assistance programs used Census data to allocate more than $2.8 trillion in federal funding. The resource siphoning disproportionally harms historically marginalized and disinvested communities, hollowing out their civic infrastructure while incentivizing rural districts to maintain and expand the prison economy. 

The impact of prison gerrymandering is profound. A study on Pennsylvania’s gerrymandering practices showed that not counting 100,000 Black incarcerated people from Philadelphia not only cost the city two major Black and Latine districts, but also inflated white suburban and rural political clout. Another study, by the Brennan Center for Justice, showed that when prison populations are reallocated to their home district, the average number of Black- and Latine-majority districts increases. Importantly, the reallocation of prison populations did not show advantage for either Republicans or Democrats. 

Despite its known harms, the Census Bureau has resisted changing its policy for incarcerated people. Prior to the 2020 census, when the agency requested public feedback on its residence criteria in 2018, over 99% of 77,863 respondents urged it to count incarcerated people in their home district. The bureau disregarded the input. 

Advocates have since turned to litigation. 

Nineteen states have passed reforms on prison gerrymandering, with 16 reallocating incarcerated people to their home district. Maryland and New York were some of the first states in 2010 and 2011 to overcome legal and administrative challenges to reassign incarcerated people’s addresses, showing that ending prison gerrymandering is feasible. 

While the common assumption is that rural areas always benefit from prison gerrymandering, that is not always the case. For example, although rural counties make up 35% of North Carolina’s population, they account for 40% of those incarcerated in the state. This suggests that prison gerrymandering can deflate the population in most rural areas while shifting political clout to the few rural areas that house the largest prisons. This is why it’s critical for state and local campaigns aimed at changing prison gerrymandering laws to focus on the rural areas where they are more likely to succeed. 

Redistricting is already a captured market that makes real democratic representation impossible. The strategy doesn’t go far enough to resolve the problems of unequal distributions of wealth and power in the U.S. Real voting requires real choices. The Founding Fathers could have given enslaved Africans voting power over many decisions affecting their daily lives, but that power would have been meaningless because they couldn’t vote out slavery. If it is a fundamental principle that the legitimacy of a state flows only from the power of the people to have complete control over the making of laws, then legislators owe their legitimacy to a continual dependency on the will of the people. 

While ending prison gerrymandering is imperative, it operates in lockstep with racial gerrymandering, a practice that is ostensibly illegal. The U.S. Supreme Court’s April decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which gutted the Voting Rights Act, has set off a race in electoral redistricting. In May, Louisiana redrew its electoral district maps, eliminating one of the state’s majority-Black House districts. Since then, the Southern states of Tennessee, Alabama, and Florida have proposed new gerrymanders ahead of midterm elections. Why is this happening across the South? 

In the region, race is a strong predictor of voting patterns. As of 2023, about 56% of the U.S. Black population resided in the South. A 2024 study examining the geography of racially polarized voting found that Black Southerners consistently voted blue, while white Southerners consistently voted red. 

The nasty ethical problem of representation remains under a Wall Street-controlled government with a history of genocide, slavery, misogyny, and racism. Our nation would end prison gerrymandering if political representation is actually a foundational pillar of the U.S. democratic system, but that’s a big “if.” 

Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Sahar Fatima, Top Editor
Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor

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