Federal Census policy harms North Carolina’s democracy — state lawmakers can fix it

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

by Aleks Kajstura, May 13, 2025

Everyone in North Carolina is supposed to have an equal voice in their government’s decisions, but an outdated and misguided Census Bureau policy that counts incarcerated people in the wrong place gives a few residents of the state a megaphone.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

North Carolina blindly follows outdated bureaucratic federal policy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, likely won’t stay there for long, and state residence law¹ says they’re not residents there. 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 state legislative districts that contain correctional facilities a particularly loud voice in government, allowing them to have an outsized influence on debates about funding childcare centers, determining pollution liability, streamlining road maintenance, permit requirements for carrying guns, 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, North Carolina is one of the remaining states still suffering from this “prison gerrymandering.” While the 2030 Census count is still years away, North Carolina needs to act now to avoid prison gerrymandering the next time it redraws its districts.

Prison gerrymandering significantly distorts North Carolina’s state legislative districts

In North Carolina, there are three State House districts that powerfully illustrate how prisons distort district populations and give some residents a louder voice in government as a result of prison gerrymandering.

In these three State House districts — districts 12, 32, and 38 — correctional facilities account for roughly 4% of the population. That means that just 96 residents of those districts 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 showcase the various ways that correctional facilities contribute to prison gerrymandering. All three districts have roughly the same level of prison gerrymandering, but the types of correctional facilities in each vary:

• District 12 contains state facilities run by the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction Facilities, which means that people incarcerated there live all over the state.
• District 38 contains state facilities as well as a county jail. While it is true that most people in county jails come from the county where the jail is located, in this instance, the people confined there are still likely counted in the wrong legislative district. That’s because the county is split among 13 State House districts.
• District 32 contains a federal correctional facility run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which means that people there come from all over the U.S. Only about 4% of people incarcerated by the Bureau of Prisons are North Carolina residents, meaning that of the 2,023 people counted at the Butner facility that were allocated to this district, only 81 are likely North Carolina residents, and the chances of all or most of that group being actual residents of District 32 are incredibly slim.

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 harms North Carolinians living in rural areas

Based on our analysis of Department of Adult Correction records, incarcerated people in North Carolina come disproportionately from rural areas. Rural counties account for 35% of the state’s population, but 40% of people incarcerated in North Carolina come from rural counties. Prison gerrymandering shifts populations away from most rural communities in the state and concentrates power in the few areas that have amassed the largest prisons.

Also, contrary to common assumption, prison gerrymandering has no partisan benefit in North Carolina. A partisan analysis of prison gerrymandering published by the Redistricting Data Hub found that prison gerrymandering has an equal impact on Republican and Democratic districts.

Prison gerrymandering disproportionately harms Black and Native American North Carolinians

Prison gerrymandering reduces the political power of nearly all North Carolina 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 legislative districts.

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

Black residents make up 21% of the state population, but a whopping 50% of people in prisons and 47% of people in jails.

Native American residents are also disproportionately impacted, making up just 1% of the state population but 2% of people in prisons and 1.3% of people in jails. That means they are incarcerated at roughly twice the rate you would expect based on their population.

Both are a stark contrast to the white population, which makes up 62% of the state but only 41% of the prison population and 47% of the jail population.

Counting incarcerated people in the wrong place adds up. Just in the three districts highlighted above, nearly 4,500 Black people were counted in the wrong place. This means that the Census Bureau policies are effectively silencing the voices of a large portion of the state’s Black residents.

North Carolina law says a prison cell is not a residence. Census Bureau policy disagrees

Not only does the Census Bureau’s redistricting data cause prison gerrymandering, it also doesn’t comply with North Carolina’s law. The state’s residence statute explicitly states that incarceration doesn’t change a person’s residence. They do not lose residence at their home address, and they do not gain residence at the correctional facility where they are held:

A person shall not be considered to have lost that person’s residence if that person leaves home… with the intention of returning

“A person shall not be considered to have gained a residence … without the intention of making that county, municipality, precinct, ward, or other election district a permanent place of abode.

N.C. Gen. Stat. S 163-57(2) and (3)

Instead of following state law, though, the Census Bureau follows its own “residence rule” to choose where to count incarcerated people — where they “live and sleep most of the time.” But it doesn’t even follow this rule properly.

The Census Bureau counts incarcerated people at the location of the facility where they happen to be held on Census Day under the mistaken belief that is where incarcerated people “live and sleep most of the time.” The facts, however, do not support its interpretation of its own definition of residence. It is well-established that in the modern era of mass incarceration, incarcerated people do not “live and sleep most of the time” at the facility where they are held on any given day (including Census Day). Nationally, 75% of people serve time in more than one prison facility, and 12% of people serve time in at least five facilities before returning home.

North Carolina is long overdue to correct its redistricting data to match its residence law and the realities of where incarcerated people actually reside. In fact, some local governments in North Carolina have already started doing that on their own when drawing city or county district lines.

Some 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 the City of Lumberton, there is a City Council district where incarcerated people account for 47% of the district’s population. The district contains the Lumberton Correctional Institution and Robeson County Jail. The result is that 53 people in that district have the same power as 100 people in the other two commissioner districts.²

Additionally, what the city may not have realized when it relied on the Census Bureau’s redistricting data, is that the jail, which actually sits outside of city limits, was counted in the wrong spot — as if it were part of the state facility next door (the state facility is actually within the city’s boundary). These sorts of errors are a common feature of the Census Bureau’s correctional facility counts, and that makes relying on the Census Bureau’s prison counts even more problematic.

Facing these absurd outcomes, some of North Carolina’s local governments have already started taking matters into their own hands and rejecting the Bureau’s way of counting incarcerated people. In the two latest redistricting cycles, at least three local governments in North Carolina have avoided prison gerrymandering to ensure their residents have equal representation in local government: Caswell, Columbus, and Granville Counties.³

In most cases, adjusting redistricting data to avoid prison gerrymandering is quite easy for local governments. However, 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 North Carolina 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 North Carolinians are falling behind, letting the state’s democracy continue to be skewed by an outdated federal system.

North Carolina 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.” North Carolina can now confidently pass legislation to count incarcerated people at home for redistricting purposes. Other states have already been successful in these efforts, paving the way for North Carolina. And the state 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 away 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. 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 change its policies about how to count incarcerated people in time for the 2030 Census, meaning that unless North Carolina acts quickly, the state will once again be driven into prison-gerrymandering their legislative districts.

North Carolina needs to end prison gerrymandering now.

Appendix: Correctional facility populations in North Carolina 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 North Carolina 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.

Analysis of rural impact: We followed the NC Rural Center’s determinations in identifying rural counties. And we used the ASQ (Automated System Query) tool, available through the Administrative Analysis Section of the NC Department of Adult Correction to determine the home counties of incarcerated people.