Federal Census policy harms Oklahoma’s democracy — but state lawmakers can end this “prison gerrymandering”

Oklahoma’s redistricting data once again skewed after the 2020 Census; the state needs to take action to fix the issue for 2030

by Aleks Kajstura, April 29, 2025

Everyone in Oklahoma is supposed to have an equal voice in their government’s decisions, but an outdated and misguided Census Bureau policy that counts incarcerated people in the wrong place gives a few residents of the state a megaphone. It is a problem known as prison gerrymandering, and Oklahoma lawmakers can fix it.

Oklahoma blindly follows an outdated bureaucratic federal policy

Every ten years, when the Census Bureau conducts its official tally of the nation’s population, it incorrectly counts incarcerated people as residents of prison cells rather than in their home communities. This is despite the fact that they usually are not from the prison town, have no family or social ties there, and likely won’t stay there for long. When state officials then use that incorrect Census data in the legislative redistricting process, they inadvertently inflate the populations of those areas — in violation of constitutional principles of equal representation. This gives residents of some state legislative districts that contain correctional facilities a particularly loud voice in government, allowing them to have an outsized influence on debates about taxation, school funding, health insurance, and more, at the expense of nearly every other person in the state.

That is why states across the country have taken steps to fix the problem that the Census Bureau created. But, Oklahoma is one of the remaining states still suffering from this “prison gerrymandering.” In fact, Oklahoma is home to the 5th most prison-gerrymandered state legislative district in the country. While the 2030 Census count is still years away, Oklahoma needs to act now to avoid prison gerrymandering the next time it redraws its districts.

Prison gerrymandering significantly distorts Oklahoma’s state legislative districts

In Oklahoma, there are three state House districts — districts 56, 18, and 63 — that powerfully illustrate how prisons distort district populations and give some residents a louder voice in government as a result of prison gerrymandering.

In District 56, for example, correctional facilities make up 14% of the population. That means that just 86 residents of that district have as much political clout as 100 residents in any other district. That imbalance in representation comes from the state choosing to redistrict based on Census numbers that don’t match the reality of where people live.

These three districts are the most prison-gerrymandered state legislative districts in Oklahoma. Large chunks of their population are made up of prisons that contain people from other parts of the state, instead of local residents.

In fact, the largest facilities in District 56 don’t even contain Oklahoma residents — they are used by the federal Bureau of Prisons to hold people from all over the country. Only about 1% of the Bureau of Prisons population comes from Oklahoma, which means out of the thousands of people held by the Bureau of Prisons in that district, only about 45 people are likely Oklahoma residents. And the chances of all or most of that group being actual residents of District 56 are incredibly slim.

It may be obvious that residents of other states shouldn’t be counted as part of a district’s population, but state facilities regularly have people who are from Oklahoma and are incarcerated far from home, have no ties to the communities where the facilities are located, and are moved regularly between facilities for administrative convenience. Simply put, being incarcerated in a specific facility doesn’t make someone a resident of the surrounding district.

Unlike actual resident populations, the facility populations counted by the Census can shift suddenly, independent of the surrounding community. For example, since the Census was taken in 2020, the Great Plains facility in District 56 was closed, then reopened, and is once again on the verge of closure.

Not only were people incarcerated in District 56 not residents of the district at the time of the Census, but a majority of them were moved when the Bureau of Prisons ended its contract with the company that owns the Great Plains facility. So the prison sat empty until the Oklahoma Department of Corrections leased the facility and filled it once again with people. The yo-yo-ing of the population in and out of the facility is set to continue as the state is starting to sour on that plan as well, likely leading to another arbitrary population change. Similarly, the 2,500 population of Lawton Correctional Facility in District 63 was subject to similar uncertainty last year. Decisions about whether to keep a prison open or not shouldn’t change how power is distributed in state government, but because of prison gerrymandering, they do.

Correctional agencies regularly move thousands of people in, out, and across the state. Distributing political power based on where incarcerated people happen to be held on Census Day makes no sense.

Prison gerrymandering disproportionately impacts Black and Native American Oklahomans

Prison gerrymandering reduces the political power of nearly all Oklahoma residents by allowing a few districts with large correctional facilities to claim residents from all over the state. And while it does that, it also enshrines the racial inequities of mass incarceration into the state’s democratic institutions.

In Oklahoma, like across the country, mass incarceration has a disproportionate impact along racial lines. Black and Native American residents are incarcerated at disproportionate rates and therefore counted in the wrong place more often than Oklahoma’s white residents.

Black residents make up only 7% of the state population but 27% of people in prisons and 23% of people in jails. Native American residents also make up 7% of the state population but 9% of people in prisons and 12% of people in jails. A stark contrast to the white population, which makes up 64% of the state but only 50 and 55% of the prison and jail population, respectively.

The racial impact of prison gerrymandering is so strong that, for example, nearly half of the Black people counted in District 18 were actually behind bars, rather than living in the community. Looking at the demographic breakdown of districts like this reinforces the fact that prison-gerrymandered districts are not representative of the actual local resident population.

Local governments are already tackling prison gerrymandering on their own

The impact of prison gerrymandering is most clearly visible at the small scale: city and county governments. With smaller districts at the city or county level, even a single facility can have a tremendous impact on the redistricting process.

For example, in Caddo County, there is a County Commissioner District where incarcerated people account for 37% of the district’s population. The district contains the Great Plains Correction Facility. The result is that 63 people in that commissioner district had the same power as 100 people in the other two commissioner districts.

Caddo County isn’t alone. We found six other counties that continue to distort their residents’ local representation by using Census Bureau’s data that counts correctional facilities as if they were local residents: Beckham, Craig, Hughes, Muskogee, Okfuskee, and Pittsburg Counties.¹

Recognizing the population problems created by the Census Bureau’s data, some of Oklahoma’s local governments have already started taking matters into their own hands to avoid prison gerrymandering. We found six local governments that used a variety of methods to ensure their residents have an equal representation in local government: Alfalfa, Akota, Greer, Wood, and Woodward Counties, as well as the City of McAlester.²

In most cases, adjusting redistricting data to avoid prison gerrymandering is quite easy for local governments. But the experience of McAlester shows that even with the best intentions, governments can fall victim to prison gerrymandering.

The City of McAlester used to exclude prison populations when redistricting, but a mid-decade charter revision unintentionally required the city to include the prison population when the 2010 round of redistricting rolled around. The new charter language pegged McAlester’s redistricting data to the Census, which, of course, tabulated people incarcerated at the two state correctional facilities in town as if they were actual residents of McAlester. This resulted in the city drawing a district where prisons accounted for 60% of the population. Then, finally, the city amended its charter once more in 2015 (after over a year of trying) to end prison gerrymandering for good.

The state can provide a more efficient and complete solution for its local governments. Although it is not fair that the state has to correct for this federal issue, the state is in a better position to take on that burden than each individual city and county.

Nationally, state and local governments are addressing the problem, but Oklahoma is lagging behind

Over the course of the last few decades, over 200 local governments and a growing number of states have taken action on their own to fix this problem. Nearly half of the US population now lives in a place that corrects redistricting data they receive from the Census to avoid prison gerrymandering.

States that have ended prison gerrymandering on their own 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. But Oklahomans are falling behind, letting the state’s democracy continue to be skewed by an outdated federal system.

Oklahoma needs to take action now

Avoiding prison gerrymandering is now well-tested with a proven track record. In fact, the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures called this effort “the fastest-growing trend in redistricting.“ Oklahoma can now confidently pass legislation to count incarcerated people at home for redistricting purposes. The process of counting incarcerated people at home has been a success for the states that have done it. And Oklahoma would have the benefit of refining its approach based on lessons learned by states that have gone through the process before. And it is easier than ever for states to act; even the Census Bureau is starting to acknowledge the problem and help.

2030 may seem far from now, but other states have learned that the earlier that reforms are put in place, the less expensive, easier to produce, and more accurate the final redistricting data becomes. Every state has a different legislative approach to ending prison gerrymandering, but as a practical matter, this model bill, prepared by a coalition of civil rights, voting rights, and criminal justice organizations, is a great place to start.³ It provides clear guidance on how this data should be collected, by whom, and how it will be used for the redistricting process.

The Census Bureau is unlikely to effect change in time for the 2030 Census, meaning that unless states act quickly, they will once again be driven into prison-gerrymandering their legislative districts. Oklahoma needs to end prison gerrymandering now.

Appendix: Correctional facility populations in Oklahoma State House Districts, 2020 Census

About the Data

Correctional Facility Populations: To calculate the percentage of each district’s population that was in correctional facilities, we used the redistricting data (PL 94-171) from the 2020 Census. Table P1 provides the total population for each Census block and Table P5 provides the number of incarcerated people for each Census Block. Notably, this approach includes people in all kinds of correctional facilities, including state prisons, federal prisons, private prisons, local jails, halfway houses, etc.

Identifying specific facilities: Table P5 provides the population of correctional facilities without distinguishing between state, federal, or private facilities and it is published for each Census block. Census blocks do not necessarily translate directly to facilities, as some facilities are counted in multiple blocks and some blocks contain multiple facilities. To aid redistricting officials and advocates with using this data, the Prison Policy Initiative maintains a Facility Locator Tool that contains annotations of most of the Census blocks in the country that contain correctional facilities. These annotations rely on publicly-available data to identify facility names and types in each of these blocks.

Calculating how many Oklahoma residents are held by the Bureau of Prisons:
Our calculations on the number of people in federal prisons in each state are based on data provided by the Bureau of Prisons in response to our periodic Freedom of Information Act requests. We’ve archived their response from 2020 at: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/2020-bop-origin.pdf

How this report quantifies prison gerrymandering compared to other analyses: There are a few ways to calculate the impact of prison gerrymandering, so other researchers may have used slightly different approaches that generate slightly different numbers for the same general problem. For example, some analyses only focus on prisons and exclude jail populations. That choice makes sense when looking at state-level policies and state districts because people in jails are very likely to also live in the legislative district where the jail is located. However, for this analysis we included jails as well as state correctional facilities because Oklahoma regularly rents space in local jails to hold a significant number of people for state authorities. Still other approaches, such as that taken by the Redistricting Data Hub, are based on estimates of incarcerated people’s home addresses. That approach adds an additional level of precision for counting people held in state facilities because it seeks to not only address where these people were counted incorrectly — which accounts for the bulk of prison gerrymandering’s population distortion — but to also estimate where they should have been counted. Unfortunately, this approach isn’t able to reflect where people in federal facilities, and most jails and private facilities are from. And so for simplicity this report doesn’t use that approach.

Each of these approaches have their own merits, and none are universally better than others; they all highlight different aspects of how prison gerrymandering skews population numbers, and each have their own use. This complex weave of data also points to the need for the Census Bureau to count incarcerated people at home in the first place in order to provide a comprehensive solution to prison gerrymandering.