friend-of-the-court brief<\/a> addressing an issue that particularly affects incarcerated persons \u2013 the issue of “prison gerrymandering.” The problem of prison gerrymandering, where incarcerated people are used to pad out districts that host prisons, is not directly at issue in the Evenwel<\/i> case, but the plaintiffs in Evenwel<\/i> have invoked the issue of prison gerrymandering as if it supported their arguments for discounting non-voters. Our “friend of the court” brief explains why they are wrong.\n<\/p>\n\nThe brief was filed on behalf of four organizations whose members have long fought prison gerrymandering, DARE (Direct Action for Rights and Equality), EPOCA (Ex-Prisoners and Prisoners Organizing for Community Advancement), VOCAL-NY (Voices of Community Activists & Leaders \u2013 New York), and VOTE (Voice of the Ex-Offender). Dēmos was joined as counsel on this brief by the Prison Policy Initiative.\n<\/p>\n
\nCurrently, the Census Bureau counts incarcerated people as if they lived at the location of the prison instead of their home addresses. This can indeed result in representational inequality when states and localities use the data for redistricting. But the ultimate goal of reforming prison gerrymandering is not to eliminate incarcerated persons entirely from the population count. Rather, the four organizations that Dēmos is representing as amici curiae want to ensure that incarcerated persons are tabulated at the correct location, as constituents of their own legislators.\n<\/p>\n
\nOur brief explains why treating incarcerated persons as “residents” of the prison where they are involuntarily detained, instead of their home communities, creates serious inaccuracies and distorts redistricting, whether or not the incarcerated persons are eligible to vote. It further explains how creating a constitutional requirement to exclude non-voting populations from the population base used for redistricting would not end prison gerrymandering, and in fact could make things worse.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Prison Policy Initiative joins Dēmos in amicus brief to SCOTUS, tackling prison gerrymandering issues in Evenwel v. Abbott<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[30],"class_list":["post-8530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8530"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9766,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8530\/revisions\/9766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8530"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=8530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}