Federal Census policy breaks Oregon’s democracy — state lawmakers can fix it
Oregon’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 23, 2025
Everyone in Oregon is supposed to have an equal voice in their government’s decisions, but an outdated and misguided Census Bureau policy that counts incarcerated people in the wrong place gives a few residents of the state a megaphone.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 Oregon lawmakers can fix it.
Oregon blindly follows outdated bureaucratic federal policy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 childcare and school funding, food stamps, expanding medical release for incarcerated people, and more, at the expense of nearly every other person in the state.
To ensure equal representation, states across the country have taken steps to fix the prison gerrymandering problem that the Census Bureau created. But, Oregon is one of the remaining states still suffering from this “prison gerrymandering.” While the 2030 Census count is still years away, Oregon needs to act now to avoid prison gerrymandering the next time it redraws its districts.
Prison gerrymandering puts one Oregon district above all others
In Oregon, residents of House of Representatives District 60 are given a louder voice in government as a result of prison gerrymandering.
Although each district should have the same number of people living in it, the state counted people at the Snake River, Warner Creek, and Powder River Correctional Facilities as if they were residents of District 60. Those 3,672 people make up over 5% of the district’s population.1
That means that just 95 residents of District 60 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.
The Census counted people incarcerated in those facilities as if they were residents of the facility location, even though state correctional 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.3 Simply put, being incarcerated in a specific facility doesn’t make someone a resident of the surrounding district.
Prison gerrymandering disproportionately harms Oregon’s Black and Native residents
Prison gerrymandering reduces the political power of nearly all Oregon residents by allowing a handful of 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 Oregon, like across the country, mass incarceration has a disproportionate impact along racial lines. In Oregon, Black and Native American residents are incarcerated at significantly higher rates and, therefore, are counted in the wrong place more often than Oregon’s white residents.
The racial impact of prison gerrymandering is so strong that, for example, 60% of Black people counted in State House District 60 were actually behind bars, rather than living in the community.
Native residents make up less than 1% of the State’s population, but 3% of people in prisons and jails. Black residents make up 2% of the state population, but a whopping 9% of people in prisons and 10% of people in jails.
Oregon’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.
Oregon 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 Oregon’s law. The state’s constitution explicitly states that being incarcerated doesn’t change a person’s residence:
For the purpose of voting, no person shall be deemed to have gained, or lost a residence … while confined in any public prison.
(Ore. Const. Art IV § 4.)
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 governments.
For example, in the City of Pendleton, there is a City Council ward where incarcerated people account for 33% of the ward’s population. That’s Ward 2, which contains the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution. The result is that 67 people in Ward 2 have the same power as 100 people in the other two wards.
Similarly, the City of Salem, which contains the Oregon State Penitentiary, Oregon State Correctional Institution, and Santiam Correctional Institution, also relied on Census data that counted people incarcerated there as if they were city residents. As a result, 13% of Ward 2 is made up of people incarcerated at the Oregon State Penitentiary. And in Ward 3, which contains the Oregon State and Santiam Correctional Institutions,4 incarcerated people account for nearly 5% of the population.
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 people,5 even when their 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 Oregon 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 Oregon is falling behind and letting the state’s democracy be skewed by an outdated federal system.
Oregon 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.“ Oregon 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 Oregon. 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, and Oregon has already taken its first steps in drafting its own tailored version of legislation — most recently introduced as HB 2250 in the 2025 regular session.6
The Census Bureau is unlikely to change its policies about how to count incarcerated people in time for the 2030 Census, meaning that unless Oregon acts quickly, the state will once again be driven into prison-gerrymandering their legislative districts.
Oregon 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 Oregon 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 for two reasons: because State House districts often split county lines in Oregon, and about 5 % of the people held in Oregon 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 Oregon House of Representatives Districts, 2020 Census
| State House District | Total Population | Incarcerated Population | Percent of the District that is Incarcerated |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 71,157 | 62 | 0.1% |
| 2 | 71,055 | 166 | 0.2% |
| 3 | 70,671 | 234 | 0.3% |
| 4 | 71,115 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 5 | 71,219 | 51 | 0.1% |
| 6 | 71,283 | 234 | 0.3% |
| 7 | 71,134 | 20 | 0.0% |
| 8 | 71,301 | 274 | 0.4% |
| 9 | 70,203 | 280 | 0.4% |
| 10 | 70,188 | 94 | 0.1% |
| 11 | 70,054 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 12 | 71,264 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 13 | 70,346 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 14 | 71,059 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 15 | 71,187 | 196 | 0.3% |
| 16 | 70,568 | 28 | 0.0% |
| 17 | 70,807 | 1,931 | 2.7% |
| 18 | 71,284 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 19 | 71,087 | 15 | 0.0% |
| 20 | 71,216 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 21 | 71,267 | 2,009 | 2.8% |
| 22 | 70,996 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 23 | 71,205 | 35 | 0.0% |
| 24 | 70,321 | 1,854 | 2.6% |
| 25 | 71,233 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 26 | 69,994 | 1,530 | 2.2% |
| 27 | 70,303 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 28 | 70,297 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 29 | 70,080 | 321 | 0.5% |
| 30 | 70,518 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 31 | 71,273 | 136 | 0.2% |
| 32 | 71,211 | 274 | 0.4% |
| 33 | 69,930 | 357 | 0.5% |
| 34 | 70,060 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 35 | 70,155 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 36 | 70,120 | 66 | 0.1% |
| 37 | 69,990 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 38 | 70,710 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 39 | 70,690 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 40 | 71,184 | 257 | 0.4% |
| 41 | 70,626 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 42 | 70,010 | 5 | 0.0% |
| 43 | 70,754 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 44 | 71,316 | 542 | 0.8% |
| 45 | 69,962 | 453 | 0.6% |
| 46 | 69,938 | 24 | 0.0% |
| 47 | 69,944 | 67 | 0.1% |
| 48 | 70,049 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 49 | 70,439 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 50 | 70,417 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 51 | 71,223 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 52 | 70,170 | 109 | 0.2% |
| 53 | 70,378 | 164 | 0.2% |
| 54 | 69,948 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 55 | 70,036 | 0 | 0.0% |
| 56 | 70,383 | 82 | 0.1% |
| 57 | 70,221 | 1,861 | 2.7% |
| 58 | 70,036 | 1,868 | 2.7% |
| 59 | 70,462 | 1017 | 1.4% |
| 60 | 71,209 | 3,818 | 5.4% |
Table notes
- Total Population
- Total population reported for all blocks in the district (as redistricted in 2022). Block populations reported for the 2020 Census in the PL 94-171 redistricting summary files Table P1.
- Incarcerated Population
- Total incarcerated population reported in all blocks in the district (as redistricted in 2022), based on the incarcerated population in group quarters reported for the 2020 Census in the PL 94-171 redistricting summary files Table P5.
- Percent of the District that is Incarcerated
- This is the number of incarcerated people counted in the district divided by the total population of the district.
Footnotes
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Of those 3,672 people counted at correctional facilities in District 60, 2,856 were counted at the Snake River Correctional Facility, 480 at Warner Creek Correctional Facility, and 336 at Powder River Correctional Facility. All three facilities were drawn into District 60, creating the highest correctional facility population of any Oregon House district. The prison gerrymandering impact for each of Oregon’s state House of Representatives is available in the Appendix. ↩
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In response to similar facts, Washington state ended prison gerrymandering in 2019. Prison populations accounted for less than 2% of any Washington State district, but that state too prided itself in drawing their districts as equally as possible. So the state ended prison gerrymandering their state districts despite what looked like “minor” impacts of prison gerrymandering. And seeing the results, three years later the state expanded the law to local governments as well. ↩
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Even worse, some facilities don’t contain Oregon residents at all. District 24, for example, contains FCI Sheridan and Camp, which are used by the Federal Bureau of Prisons to hold people from all over the country. Only half of one percent of the Bureau of Prisons population comes from Oregon, which means out of the 1,790 people held by the Bureau of Prisons at the FCI Sheridan and Camp, only about 9 people are likely Oregon residents. And of those 9 Oregon residents, it’s unlikely that even one person would be an actual resident of District 24. ↩
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There are also 271 people who were incarcerated at the Mill Creek Correctional Facility at the time of the 2020 Census and are still counted as if they were residents of Ward 3, despite the facility closing in 2021.
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Nationwide we identified over 200 local governments that avoided prison gerrymandering after the 2000 and 2010 Censuses (decades when zero and two, respectively, states adjusted their redistricting data to count people at home). This decade we limited the scope of our research but still found an additional 21 local governments scattered across 10 states that started doing so after the 2020 Census despite those states continuing to use unadjusted data for state-level districts. ↩
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Though the text of that bill may look far from it now, it actually traces its legacy to this model bill, prepared by a coalition of civil rights, voting rights, and criminal justice organizations.
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