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

Florida’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, October 15, 2025

Everyone in Florida is supposed to have an equal voice in their government’s decisions, but an outdated and misguided Census Bureau policy that counts incarcerated people in the wrong place gives a few residents of the state a megaphone.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

Florida blindly follows outdated bureaucratic federal policy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, are often moved between facilities and won’t stay there after release. 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 gun safety, Community Reinvestment Agencies, wetlands protection and development, 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 this problem that the Census Bureau created. But, Florida is one of the remaining states still suffering from this “prison gerrymandering.” While the 2030 Census count is still years away, Florida needs to act now to avoid prison gerrymandering the next time it redraws its districts.

Prison gerrymandering significantly distorts Florida’s state legislative districts

In Florida, there are four 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 four House of Representatives districts — districts 7, 10, 5, and 52 — correctional facilities account for a significant portion of the population. In District 7, for example, correctional facilities make up about 10% of the population. That means that just 90 residents of that district have as much political clout as 100 residents in normal 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 four districts are the most prison-gerrymandered state legislative districts in Florida. Significant portions of their population are made up of prisons that contain people from all over 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.

Even worse, the largest facility in District 52 — accounting for nearly 70% of incarcerated people in that district — is FCC Coleman, which is used by the Federal Bureau of Prisons to hold people from all over the country. About 6% of the Bureau of Prisons population comes from Florida, which means out of the 6,285 people held by the Bureau of Prisons at FCC Coleman, only about 371 people are likely Florida residents. And most of those 371 Florida residents are unlikely to be actual residents of District 52.

But even incarcerated people who are Florida residents aren’t usually residents of the district where the Census Bureau counted them. 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. 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. Simply being held in a correctional institution does not make that facility your residence.

Prison gerrymandering disproportionately harms Florida’s Black residents

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

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

The racial impact of prison gerrymandering is so strong that, for example, about a third of all Black people counted in State House Districts 7 and 52 were actually behind bars, rather than living in the community. ²

Statewide, Black residents make up 15% of the state population, but nearly half of the people in prisons and 41% of the people in jails.

Counting incarcerated people in the wrong place adds up. Just in the four districts highlighted above, nearly 25,000 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.

Florida’s local governments are already tackling prison gerrymandering on their own

The impact of prison gerrymandering is also clearly visible at the small scale, which is why county governments across the country are leading the way in solving the problem. ³ At least 7 Florida counties already avoided prison gerrymandering in the 2010 redistricting cycle, when in 2016 the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida ruled that prison gerrymandering was unconstitutional in a case that involved the Jefferson County Board of County Commissioners’ districts. As a result, local governments’ redistricting after the 2020 Census eliminated the last of the significant prison gerrymanders at the local level. This included at least 4 counties that previously engaged in prison gerrymandering — Gadsden, Jackson, Jefferson, and Suwannee Counties.

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 Florida 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 Florida is falling behind and letting the state’s democracy be skewed by an outdated federal system.

Florida 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.” Florida 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 Florida. 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 Florida acts quickly, the state will once again be driven into prison-gerrymandering their legislative districts.

Florida needs to end prison gerrymandering now.

Appendix: Correctional facility populations in Florida House of Representatives 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: Census Bureau’s PL 94-171 data 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 Florida 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 7% of the people held in Florida 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, or FRRC’s maps based on last-known addresses for people incarcerated in Florida’s Department of Corrections. Those approaches 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.