Federal Census policy breaks Wyoming’s democracy — state lawmakers can fix it

Wyoming’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, July 9, 2025

Everyone in Wyoming is supposed to have an equal voice in their government’s decisions, but an outdated and misguided Census Bureau policy that counts incarcerated people in the wrong place gives a few residents of the state a megaphone.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

Wyoming blindly follows outdated bureaucratic federal policy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 law 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 school vouchers, gun-free zones, taxation, and more, at the expense of nearly every other person in the state.

In order to ensure equal representation, states across the country have taken steps to fix the prison gerrymandering problem that the Census Bureau created. But, Wyoming is one of the remaining states still suffering from this “prison gerrymandering.” While the 2030 Census count is still years away, Wyoming needs to act now to avoid prison gerrymandering the next time it redraws its districts.

Prison gerrymandering significantly distorts Wyoming’s state legislative districts

Wyoming currently has one of the ten worst prison gerrymandered districts in the country. By relying on the Census Bureau’s data, Wyoming drew a district where more than 1 in 10 people are in a correctional facility rather than actual district residents. Surprisingly, this is actually an improvement over what the state did last decade, when it drew a blatantly prison-gerrymandered Senate district that snaked around an incumbent’s house and then followed the Nebraska border for 17 miles to snag a prison to pad out its population.

The good news is that, after the 2020 Census, the state didn’t embrace prison gerrymandering quite so explicitly. The bad news is that there are House of Representatives districts that still powerfully illustrate how the federal government steers states into prison gerrymandering, even if states don’t do it intentionally.

In these two House of Representatives districts — districts 2 and 15 — correctional facilities account for a significant portion of the population. In District 83, for example, correctional facilities make up about 14% of the population. That means that just 86 residents of that district have as much political clout as 100 residents in other districts. 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 two districts are the most prison-gerrymandered state legislative districts in Wyoming. Large chunks of their population are made up of prisons that contain people from other parts of the state, 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. Simply put, being incarcerated in a specific facility doesn’t make someone a resident of the surrounding district.

Prison gerrymandering disproportionately harms Wyoming’s Black and Native residents

Prison gerrymandering reduces the political power of nearly all Wyoming residents by allowing a few districts with large correctional facilities to claim residents from all over the state. It particularly harms Black and Native people and enshrines the racial inequities of mass incarceration into the state’s legislative districts.

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

The racial impact of prison gerrymandering is so strong that, for example, most Black people and a majority of Native people counted in State House District 2 were actually behind bars, rather than living in the community.

Black residents make up less than 1% of the state population, but 5% of people in prisons and jails. Native residents make up 2% of the State’s population, but a whopping 7% of people in prisons and 12% of people in jails.

Wyoming’s disproportionate incarceration of Black and Native residents, combined with the Census Bureau counting incarcerated people as if they live at the facility location, means the state is effectively silencing the voices of a large portion of the state’s Black and Native residents.

Wyoming 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 Wyoming’s law. The state’s residence statute explicitly states that being incarcerated doesn’t change a person’s residence:

“(A) Residence is the place where a person has a current habitation and to which, whenever he is absent, he has the intention of returning;
“(B) A person shall not gain or lose residence merely by reason of his presence or absence while… [k]ept at a hospital or other institution.”

Wyoming Annotated Statutes §22-1-102(a)(xxx)

Being held in a correctional institution simply does not change your residence. And most incarcerated people intend to return home. Incarcerated people don’t generally stay in the area of the prison after their release and almost always go back to the communities they came from — if not the exact address they lived at before their arrest. So, under Wyoming law, they aren’t residents of the facility location.

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 when it comes to counting incarcerated people.

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 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.

Representation in local government is also harmed by prison gerrymandering

The impact of prison gerrymandering is also clearly visible at the small scale: city and county governments.

For example, in the city of Rawlins, there is a City Council ward where incarcerated people account for 20% of the ward’s population. Ward 1 contains the Wyoming State Penitentiary. The result is that 80 people in Ward 1 have the same power as 100 people in the other two wards.

Facing these absurd distortions in representation, local governments across the country are taking matters into their own hands and rejecting the Bureau’s way of counting incarcerated people¹, even when states fail to act.

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.

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

Wyoming needs to take action now

Adjusting redistricting data to avoid prison gerrymandering is now a well-tested strategy with a proven track record. In fact, the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures called this effort “the fastest-growing trend in redistricting.” Wyoming 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 Wyoming. 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 Wyoming acts quickly, the state will once again be driven into prison-gerrymandering their legislative districts.

Wyoming needs to end prison gerrymandering now.

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 Wyoming 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.

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 12% of the people held in Wyoming jails are held for state and federal 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. The complexities inherent in the current patchwork approach to identifying and solving prison gerrymandering point 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.

Appendix: Correctional facility populations in Wyoming House of Representatives Districts, 2020 Census