“There are many ways to hijack political power. One of them is to draw state or city legislative districts around large prisons — and pretend that the inmates are legitimate constituents.”—Brent Staples
What’s new
- 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.... Read more
- 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.... Read more
- 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. Read more
Is prison gerrymandering new to you?
Welcome! We wrote a guide to the resources on this website.
Progress towards ending prison gerrymandering
The Prison Policy Initiative launched a movement to protect our democracy from the prison industrial complex. And we’re winning; 49.6% of US residents now live in a state that has formally rejected prison gerrymandering. Here is the progress at a glance:
The national movement against prison gerrymandering began in 2001 when the founders of the Prison Policy Initiative discovered that the sheer size of the prison population was combining with an outdated Census Bureau rule to seriously distort how political decisions are made in this country. We put numbers to the problem and suggested solutions in a series of reports and sparked a national movement.
Since then, we’ve made tremendous progress towards ending prison gerrymandering:
- More than a dozen states passed legislation to end prison-based gerrymandering and count incarcerated people at home for redistricting purposes. Maryland and New York's laws changed the 2011 redistricting, and California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Nevada, New Jersey, Virginia, and Washington State's laws applied to the 2020 redistricting cycle. Meanwhile the redistricting commissions and committees in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Montana counted people at home of their own initiative to avoid prison gerrymandering for the 2020 redistricting cycle. Additionally, Illinois, Montana, Maine, and Minnesota now have laws on the books and will roll out their implementation in time for 2030. New York's law was upheld by the New York Supreme Court, and Maryland's law was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States.
- For 2010, the Census Bureau agreed to publish prison count data earlier than in the past, in order to assist states and counties with reallocating or removing incarcerated populations during the redistricting process, and for 2020 it released the data even earlier, bundling the prison count with the traditional (PL 94-171) redistricting data.
- Our research and organizing has led hundreds of county and municipal governments across the country to reject the Census Bureau’s prison counts and avoid prison-based gerrymandering.
- We led hundreds of civil rights, voting rights and criminal justice organizations and nearly 100,000 individuals to ask the Census Bureau to end prison gerrymandering before the 2020 Census.
- To support further progress, we released a guide to ending prison gerrymandering for state legislators. A joint effort with SiX, it includes lessons from our previous advocacy, detailed policy recommendations, talking points, and more to guide states introducing and passing legislation.
Don’t miss two of our resources:
Ending Prison Gerrymandering: How state legislators can ensure accurate & equitable redistricting
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No, prison gerrymandering doesn't reallocate $1,838 per person
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Recommended Reading:
About the Prison Policy Initiative
Learn more about the organization behind the Prison Gerrymandering Project.
The Racial Geography of Mass Incarceration
The transfer of Black and Latino incarcerated people to communities very different than their own is a nationwide problem.
How to get elected without being a candidate first.
Iowa Public Radio explores how Anamosa Iowa ended prison gerrymandering.
Events
- October 11-13, 2024:
Prison Policy Initiative’s Advocacy Department (Sarah Staudt and Emmett Sanders) will be at the Formerly Incarcerated, Convicted People, and Families Movement (FICPFM) conference in Detroit, Michigan from Friday, October 11th to Sunday, October 13. If you’re going to be there, contact us if you’d like to meet up and talk about how Prison Policy Initiative might be able to support your state and local activism to change the criminal legal system!
Not near you?
Invite us to your city, college or organization.