Federal Census policy harms Louisiana’s democracy — but state lawmakers can fix it

Louisiana’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 28, 2025

Everyone in Louisiana is supposed to have an equal voice in their government’s decisions, but an outdated and misguided Census Bureau policy that counts incarcerated people in the wrong place gives a few residents of the state a megaphone.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

Louisiana blindly follows an outdated bureaucratic federal policy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, likely won’t stay there for long, and state 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 election laws, education, unemployment, gun laws, 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, Louisiana is one of the remaining states still suffering from this “prison gerrymandering.”

The legislative districts currently in place were deemed unconstitutional in 2024 for diluting representation for Black people, and prison gerrymandering makes the situation even worse than assumed by the court. This report analyzes the districts as drawn in 2022 since no new maps have been put in place, and it’s unclear whether they will be redrawn before the 2027 elections.

Louisiana needs to act now to avoid prison gerrymandering during the 2030 redistricting cycle — as well as the current court-ordered process.

Prison gerrymandering significantly distorts Louisiana’s state legislative districts

In Louisiana, there are three state House districts — districts 22, 18, and 32 — 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 22, for example, correctional facilities make up roughly 12% of the population. That means that just 88 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. And Louisiana’s huge prison populations — only El Salvador incarcerates people at a higher rate — leave it especially vulnerable to the Census Bureau’s flawed prison counts.

These three districts are the most prison-gerrymandered state legislative districts in Louisiana. Large chunks of their population are made up of prisons that contain people from other parts of the state (or other states), instead of local residents. State facilities regularly contain people who 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.

Even worse, the largest facilities in Districts 22 and 32 don’t contain Louisiana 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 Louisiana, which means out of the thousands of people held by the Bureau of Prisons in those districts, only about 46 people are likely Louisiana residents. And the chances of all or most of that group being actual residents of Districts 22 or 32 are incredibly slim.

Similarly, immigration detention facilities also skew Louisiana’s district populations beyond those districts highlighted above. Of the 20 largest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities in the country, five are in the state, leaving Louisiana residents’ access to equal representation uniquely vulnerable to the ebb and flow of federal confinement policies. The U.S. Constitution is clear: all residents — regardless of their legal status — must be counted by the Census Bureau every ten years. The question isn’t whether they should be counted but where. Most people detained in immigration facilities in Louisiana spend less than a month in that facility, so it makes no sense to count them as if they were residents of the town where the facility happens to be located on Census Day.

Simply put, being incarcerated in a specific facility doesn’t make someone a resident of the surrounding district.

Prison gerrymandering harms Louisiana’s rural residents

Incarcerated people come from all over Louisiana, but rural parishes have the highest incarceration rates in the state. Incarcerated people in Louisiana come from every corner of the state; every single one of the state’s 64 parishes has its residents counted as if they were residents of another parish due to the way the Census Bureau counts incarcerated people. While the largest number of incarcerated people come from the most populous parishes, on a per-capita basis, rural parishes lose the largest shares of their populations to the Bureau’s counts.

This map shows the portion of each parish’s population that is missing from the parish’s Census counts due to incarceration. This map and analysis come from our Where people in prison come from: The geography of mass incarceration in Louisiana report, and details on each parish, including the raw numbers, are available in the “Parishes” appendix there.

And small cities such as Bogalusa, Ville Platte, Bastrop, and Marksville have imprisonment rates higher than New Orleans, Shreveport, and Baton Rouge, though more incarcerated people come from the larger cities.

So while a few rural communities with large prisons claim residents from other parts of the state all over the state, they are claiming residents of other rural communities too. That means that while a few rural communities benefit from counting incarcerated people as if they were local residents, on the whole, counting incarcerated people in the wrong place harms most rural communities.

Prison gerrymandering disproportionately impacts Louisiana’s Black residents

Prison gerrymandering reduces the political power of nearly all Louisiana 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 Louisiana, like across the country, mass incarceration has a disproportionate impact along racial lines. In Louisiana, Black residents are incarcerated at disproportionate rates and therefore, counted in the wrong place more often than Louisiana’s white residents.

Black residents make up only 32% of the state population, but 66% of people in prisons and 57% of people in jails. A stark contrast to the white population, which makes up 58% of the state but only 34% of the prison population and 38% of the jail population.

Counting incarcerated people in the wrong place adds up. Just in the three districts highlighted in this report, an estimated 7,000 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.

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

Not only does the Census Bureau’s redistricting data skew representation, it also doesn’t comply with Louisiana’s residence law. The state’s statute on voting residence — determining where someone is represented — is clear that just being present in a place doesn’t make you a resident there. It explicitly requires a person to have an intent to reside there indefinitely:

“For purposes of the laws governing voter registration and voting, ‘resident’ means a citizen who resides in this state and in the parish, municipality, if any, and precinct in which he offers to register and vote, with an intention to reside there indefinitely.”

Louisiana Annotated Revised Statutes S 18:101(B)

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 its own rule properly.

The Census Bureau counts incarcerated people at the location of the specific 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 . And, as a general rule, incarcerated people tend to return home rather than stay at the correctional facility or the surrounding community indefinitely.

Louisiana 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 Louisiana have actually already started doing that on their own when drawing city or parish district lines.

Most 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 parish governments. With smaller districts at the local government level, even a single facility can have a tremendous impact on the redistricting process.

For example, in Madison Parish, there are two Police Jury Districts — Districts 2 and 3 — where incarcerated people account for 11 and 17% of the districts’ populations, respectively. District 2 contains the Louisiana Transitional Center for Women, and District 3 contains the Madison Parish Correctional and Detention Centers. That means 89 people in Policy Jury District 2, and 83 people in Police Jury District 3 have the same power as 100 people in Police Jury Districts 1, 4, and 5.

Recognizing the problems created by the Census Bureau’s data, most places in Louisiana that have significant correctional facility populations have already started taking matters into their own hands to avoid prison gerrymandering. Last decade, Allen and Catahoula Parishes drew maps where correctional facilities accounted for over half of a district’s population.² This decade Allena and Catahoula avoided prison gerrymandering for the first time, joining 17 other Louisiana local governments that avoided prison gerrymandering in 2010: Avoyelles, Caldwell, Claiborne, Concordia, East Carroll, East Feliciana, Evangeline, Grant, Iberville, La Salle, Richland, West Carroll, West Feliciana, Winn Parishes, and Town of Amite City, and the City of Oakdale.³

In most cases, adjusting redistricting data to avoid prison gerrymandering is quite easy for local governments. The state, however, can provide a more efficient and complete solution for its local governments. Although it is not fair that Louisiana has to correct this federal issue, the state is in a better position to take on that burden than each individual city and parish.

Nationally, state and local governments are addressing the problem, but Louisiana 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 Louisianans are falling behind, letting the state’s democracy continue to be skewed by an outdated federal system.

Louisiana 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.“ Louisiana 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 Louisiana 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.⁴ It provides clear guidance on how this data should be collected, by whom, and how it will be used for the redistricting process.

And if Louisiana wants to avoid prison gerrymandering while redrawing its maps in response to the court order, then the state legislature can do so as part of the redistricting process — similar to the independent action by the redistricting bodies in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Montana.

The one option that Louisiana does not have is waiting for the Census Bureau to solve the problem for them. The Bureau is unlikely to effect change even in time for the 2030 Census, meaning that unless Louisiana acts quickly, the state will once again be driven into prison-gerrymandering their legislative districts.

Appendix: Correctional facility populations in Louisiana 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 Louisiana 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 here.

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 jails in Louisiana regularly 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, most jails, and private facilities are from. And so, for simplicity, this report doesn’t use that approach.

Each of these approaches has its own merits, and none are universally better than others; they all highlight different aspects of how prison gerrymandering skews population numbers, and each has its 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.