In Michigan, thousands of incarcerated people are counted in the population of the communities where they’re imprisoned—not where they actually live and will return after release. This practice, called prison gerrymandering, gives extra political clout to districts that host prisons while reducing representation for the home communities of incarcerated individuals.

The result? A skewed democracy that deepens inequities for justice-impacted populations. These communities lose political voice, while prison towns gain influence from residents who can’t vote.

Voting Access for All and statewide advocates argue that ending prison gerrymandering is a necessary step toward fair representation and a truly inclusive democracy.

Read Bridge Michigan’s full report on prison gerrymandering to learn more about the scope of the problem—and why reform matters now.

The post Prison Gerrymandering in Michigan: Distorting Democracy appeared first on Voting Access For All.

By Passing SB 494, We Can:

• Ensure fair representation for all Michiganders.
• Restore political power to neighborhoods affected by mass incarceration.
• Promote an accurate and just democratic process.

Take Action Now

Here’s how you can help:

 Contact Your State Representative.

Urge them to support and vote YES on SB 494.

Find Your State Representative.

 Share Your Voice.

Explain why fair representation matters to you and your community.

 Spread the Word.

Encourage your friends, family, and neighbors to take action, too.

Together, We Can Make a Difference.

Let’s ensure Michigan values every voice and leaves no community behind. Lawmakers need to know we’re watching—and we’re counting on them to do the right thing.

If you support SB 494, now is the time to make your voice heard.

Thank you for standing with us in this fight for justice and representation!

Learn more about prison gerrymandering on our website. For current details on the status of this and other bills, follow the MI-CEMI bill tracker.

Prison Gerrymandering is a critical issue of fairness and representation in Michigan. Across our state, incarcerated individuals are counted as residents of the districts where they are confined, rather than their home communities. This practice distorts our district maps, shifts resources unfairly, and dilutes the voices of communities most impacted by incarceration, including many Black and underserved populations.

Detroit in particular, one of Michigan’s most incarcerated cities, grapples with Prison Gerrymandering. Many Detroit residents are held far from home in prisons, where they’re counted as residents, not in their own communities. This practice distorts district maps and dilutes the voices of our Black population. By ending Prison Gerrymandering, we can ensure fair representation and empower our neighborhoods to reclaim their political power.

I urge you to support SB 494 and join us in building a Michigan that ensures our district maps accurately reflect all the voices and people of our state.

The post Prison Gerrymandering: Contact Your State Representative Today appeared first on Voting Access For All.

We’ve identified over 200 cities and counties that have taken action to avoid prison gerrymandering and some local governments that still continue to base representation on flawed Census Bureau data.

Aleks Kajstura at Prison Policy Initiative

The post Prison Policy Initiative: Local Governments and Prison Gerrymandering appeared first on Voting Access For All.

by Mike Wessler and Aleks Kajstura, June 10, 2024

During the 2020 redistricting cycle, more than a dozen states took it upon themselves to do what the Census Bureau has refused: end prison gerrymandering. Through their redistricting process, they worked to unwind the flawed way the Bureau counts incarcerated people — as residents of a prison cell — and instead count them where they actually live, creating legislative districts that more accurately reflect actual resident populations.

Prison gerrymandering is a problem created because the Census Bureau counts incarcerated people as residents of a prison cell rather than at their true communities. When states then use Census data during their redistricting process, they artificially inflate the population of prison communities and give them a larger voice in government.

With such rapid growth in the movement to address prison gerrymandering, it is natural to wonder: How successful were these states? How many people were they able to count at their home addresses?

It is an important question with huge implications; 19 states are already poised to adjust their redistricting data to address prison gerrymandering in the 2030 redistricting cycle. These questions can help states evaluate how they can do better during the 2030 redistricting cycle. It can guide states that haven’t yet adopted anti-prison gerrymandering laws but are considering them. Finally, it can illustrate how states are limited in their ability to solve this problem in ways the Census Bureau is not.

To answer these questions, we reviewed redistricting reports and data from 13 states that addressed prison gerrymandering after the 2020 census to understand how many people in state prisons they attempted to count in their home communities and how many they were able to reallocate successfully.

Perfection isn’t possible, so it’s not the goal

Before diving into our analysis, it is important to remember that it is impossible and unrealistic for states to successfully reallocate everyone in their prisons to their home communities.

There are three primary reasons why a state can’t count an incarcerated person at their home address:

1. The person’s last address is in a different state: States don’t have the power to reallocate people across state lines, so they cannot count people from out of state in their home community.
2. The state has decided not to reallocate an incarcerated person for a policy-based reason: Unfortunately, some states have implemented arbitrary limitations on their reforms by excluding certain incarcerated people from being counted in their home communities. For example, Rhode Island did the mapping work for all people incarcerated in the state correctional facilities. However, it chose to count incarcerated people with more than two years left on their sentence at the prison location in the redistricting data. While we and other organizations think this is misguided, it is the choice policymakers have made, so redistricting staff could not count them in their home community.
3. Erroneous or missing data: State redistricting officials often rely on their Department of Corrections (DOC) to get address data for incarcerated people. Generally, that data contains everything they need to implement their reforms. However, sometimes data is missing or erroneous. Apart from typos and other record-keeping errors in home address data, there are a few situations where home addresses are missing altogether. For example, if an incarcerated person indicated they were unhoused before coming to prison, the DOC will likely leave the address field blank or note “homeless.” This may be an appropriate response for prison staff, but it creates problems for redistricting officials.
4. While there are some steps redistricting officials can take to reduce this number, it often takes time, which is something they don’t have much of.

These limitations make it impossible for a state to reallocate 100% of people in its prisons to their home communities, so when they evaluate their success, they shouldn’t grade themselves against perfection. Instead, they should ask themselves: “Of the people it was possible to reallocate, how many did we reallocate?”

How did states do?

For our analysis, we looked at two key numbers:

1. The state’s success rate for reallocating people that it was possible to count at home.
2. The total percentage of people in state prisons counted at their home address.

Our analysis:

shows that most states did remarkably well. This is noteworthy because 2020 was a notoriously difficult redistricting cycle, in which Census data was delayed, and many states adopted prison gerrymandering reform laws late in the decade.

Of the 13 states we analyzed, 10 published their methodology. Nine out of 10 were able to reallocate at least 80% of people with addresses that met the states’ criteria, with Nevada being the lone exception. Impressively, California successfully mapped every address that it attempted.

States were so successful that even in two of the three states where we could not fully analyze the success rate because they didn’t publish their methodology — Virginia and Washington — we can tell that roughly 90% of their total state prison population was successfully reallocated to their home communities. Importantly, like Rhode Island (which we explained above), Pennsylvania also made a policy choice to exclude certain incarcerated people from these reforms, instantly lowering the portion of its prison population that could be counted at home.

Getting to 100%

While states have done a remarkable job implementing these reforms, every incarcerated person should be counted in their home communities for redistricting purposes. What can government officials do to accomplish this?

1. Start collecting, assessing, and cleaning data early: Getting good data from the Department of Corrections is critical to successfully implementing reforms. That’s why state redistricting officials should work with that agency now to ensure it is collecting the data they’ll need during the next redistricting cycle. Similarly, states that haven’t yet addressed prison gerrymandering should adopt and implement policies to do so now. This will ensure prisons collect and maintain high-quality address data for people they incarcerate.
2. Don’t adopt arbitrary limitations on reforms: When adopting anti-prison gerrymandering reforms, states should include all incarcerated people, regardless of the length of their sentence. Even if a person is likely to spend decades behind bars, they’re still not a resident of the legislative district that contains the prison

1. — they don’t have ties to that community, they don’t call it home, and if they have a problem that they want lawmakers to fix they’re not likely to call the legislator who represents the prison but rather the elected officials from their home community — so the town containing the prison shouldn’t get an outsized voice in government simply because the facility happens to be located there.
2. The Census Bureau must change its policies: Even if states do everything in their power to address prison gerrymandering, there will still be some incarcerated people that they can’t count in their home districts, most frequently those who come from different states. Similarly, but not covered in this analysis, if a state contains a federal prison, redistricting officials cannot reallocate those incarcerated people to their home communities. The Census Bureau is the only government entity with the power to address this problem completely and across state lines.

This analysis shows that states have been incredibly successful in implementing reforms to address prison gerrymandering. History suggests that if the Census Bureau fails to resolve this problem, states will do even better during the 2030 redistricting cycle. This should give confidence to places considering similar reforms and motivate them to take action now.

Ultimately, though, to fully address prison gerrymandering, the Census Bureau should listen to the growing bipartisan consensus among states and adjust its policies to end prison gerrymandering nationwide.

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by Aleks Kajstura, May 14, 2024 from the Prison Policy Initiative

Download our one-pager for a quick summary of the evidence that shows incarcerated people return home after their release.

Incarcerated people return to their home communities after release. That’s a fact that is obvious to anyone who lives in a community hard hit by mass incarceration. Yet when states seek to end prison gerrymandering by counting incarcerated people at home for redistricting purposes, some people ask why we should use someone’s home address — concerned that they might not return to that exact place after release or even might stay in the prison town.

Unfortunately, because we can’t predict the future and because prisons and jails generally don’t track where people go after their release, this has been a hard question to answer. However, we collected several unique datasets to fill this gap and provide the best evidence possible of where people go after being released from prison. We found:

• Incarcerated people don’t generally stay in the area of the prison after their release.
• Incarcerated people almost always go back to the communities they came from — if not the exact address they lived at before their arrest.
• Counting incarcerated people in prisons is likely the least accurate place to count them.

In theory, every legislative district within a state is supposed to have the same population to ensure everyone has equal representation from elected officials. However, the Census frustrates this goal by counting nearly 2 million incarcerated people as residents of the places in which they are detained instead of at their home addresses. The resulting Census data leads to “prison gerrymandering” — legislative districts that skew representation in favor of people who live near prisons and other correctional facilities.

To avoid prison gerrymandering, states have taken it upon themselves to count incarcerated people at home in their redistricting data. In practical terms, this means counting people at the pre-incarceration address on file with the Department of Corrections.

People don’t stay near the prison after release

There are two widely-accepted truths about mass incarceration:

1. Black and Hispanic people are consistently overrepresented in prisons
2. In most states, prisons are built in rural, largely-white communities.

With this in mind — along with the fact that more than half a million people enter and leave prison every year — you can conclude that if even a small portion of people stayed near the prison after release, those communities would, over time, begin to look similar to those on the inside, but that’s not the case.

In 2015, we released a report that explored the racial geography of mass incarceration. It showed that in 208 counties with prisons, the portion of the free population that was Black was at least 10 times smaller than the portion of the prison population that was Black. These trends were so strong, in fact, that we found 161 counties where the number of incarcerated Black people was actually bigger — by raw number — than the number of free Black people.

If people in prison stayed in those communities after their release, these dramatic disparities would not exist.

People go home after release

Unfortunately, while prison systems generally keep people’s home addresses on file, they don’t track whether they actually return to that address upon release. However, addresses for people on probation and parole can be a reasonably accurate proxy to fill this gap. That’s because a significant number of incarcerated people are on probation or parole after their release.

Comparing these two sets of addresses, we can get a sense of whether people return to where they came from after incarceration. If the portion of incarcerated people from an area is similar to the portion of people on probation or parole from that area, you can reasonably conclude that people are returning to their home communities after incarceration.

Rhode Island serves as a useful example for this analysis because all of its correctional facilities, including pre-trial facilities, are located in one correctional complex (in the city of Cranston). In most states, people are held pre-trial in jails, usually close to home, but in Rhode Island, they are incarcerated equally far from home, whether they are held for a few days or a few years.

We looked at the state’s probation and parole data for 2020 and compared it to the state’s 2020 redistricting data that counted incarcerated people at home.

Examining this data for the five largest cities in the state, you see that the numbers align quite closely, reinforcing the fact that incarcerated people almost always return to their home communities after their release.

It is worth noting that Providence, the state’s biggest city, represented a larger portion of the incarcerated population than the probation/parole population. While some may be tempted to say this disproves our point, it is important to remember the context of this time period. The probation/parole data was from December 2020, at the pandemic’s peak, when many urban areas saw their populations dramatically decrease due to health and economic concerns and the desire for more space. Based on the patterns in the other communities, it is reasonable to conclude this data represents pandemic-era fluctuations and should be treated as such.

Importantly, you can also see more incarcerated people come from Cranston than are there while on probation and parole. This is another sign that most people don’t stay near the prison after incarceration unless they are from there originally.

These numbers aren’t a perfect match, which means that the exact address someone ends up at is sometimes different than the one they had on file while incarcerated. However, it clearly shows that people almost always return to their home communities after incarceration.

Prison is the least accurate place for the Census Bureau to count incarcerated people

Even if someone is unconvinced by the data showing that incarcerated people are likely to return to their home communities after their release, there are plenty of reasons — backed up by hard data — that make clear that by counting incarcerated people at prisons, the Census Bureau is choosing the least accurate option.

People are incarcerated further from home than most people choose to live

Over 60% of people in state prison are held at least 100 miles from their homes. Importantly, according to the Census Bureau, 80% of people in the U.S. who are of similar median age to the incarcerated population (roughly 30-years-old) still live within 100 miles of where they grew up.

By counting incarcerated people at prisons, the Census Bureau is choosing the least accurate option.

When someone is incarcerated, they are moved far from their daily surroundings and usually locked up somewhere they never visit on their own — let alone live. They’ll likely never know anyone outside of the prison walls, nor rent a house, visit a business, or attend a community event there. So why would the Census Bureau decide this was their home?

People counted at the prison on Census Day aren’t likely there for long

There is a common misconception that a person in a prison will be in that facility for a long time — this is the mistaken belief that is the foundation of the Census Bureau’s choice to count incarcerated people there. But this simply isn’t true.

The average time served by people in state prison is 2.7 years, with this “average” pulled up by the few people serving very long sentences; the median time served is 15 months. Short stays in prison are common. For example, in Rhode Island, the median length of stay for people serving a sentence in the state’s correctional facilities is only 99 days. This means that most people counted at a state prison on Census Day will spend the vast majority of the next decade outside the prison walls.

Even people incarcerated away from home for a year or longer are not in one place. They move between multiple facilities. Nationally, 75% of people serve time in more than one prison facility, 12% of people serve time in at least five facilities before returning home. While they are being shuffled between facilities, incarcerated people maintain a usual residence elsewhere; their pre-incarceration home remains the only actual stable address.

A home address is the most accurate option

The home address someone has on file with the Department of Corrections may not be the exact place they return to after incarceration. However, it is a close approximation of where they reside through and after incarceration. While some of these address records may vary in precision, the one address we know is wrong is the facility address.

States that adjust their redistricting data to count incarcerated people at home use the home addresses contained in their Departments of Corrections records. This practice creates redistricting data that better reflects the populations of communities hardest hit by mass incarceration and communities that contain large prison populations. The Census Bureau should count incarcerated people at home in the 2030 Census using home address data as the states have done.

Grab our one-pager about this issue at prisonpolicy.org.

Footnotes

1. The Probation and Parole data is from December 2020 and the redistricting data is from April 2020 — these are the closest dates available. While the distribution of people in prison in April 2020 geocoded to their hometowns is not a perfect match to the hometowns of people on probation and parole in December 2020, it is close enough to draw some conclusions. It clearly shows that the towns where incarcerated people come from are the same towns where incarcerated people go after release.  

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May 20, 2024

Originally published Minnesota ends prison gerrymandering to the Prisoners of the Census Blog.

On Friday, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz signed HF 4772 — an omnibus elections policy bill — into law, officially ending prison gerrymandering in the state. With this action, Minnesota joins the rapidly growing list of states that have taken action on this issue. The measure requires state and local governments to count incarcerated people at their home addresses when drawing new political districts during their redistricting process.

Prison gerrymandering is a problem created because the Census Bureau incorrectly counts incarcerated people as residents of their prison cells rather than their home communities. As a result, when states use Census data to draw new state or local districts, they inadvertently give residents of districts with prisons greater political clout than all other state residents.

“With this law, yet another state has rejected the Census Bureau’s flawed way of counting incarcerated people to ensure its residents have an equal voice in their government,” said Aleks Kajstura, Legal Director of the Prison Policy Initiative and the head of the organization’s campaign to end prison gerrymandering. “Roughly half the country now lives in a place that has ended prison gerrymandering. With so many places taking action on this issue, it raises the question, ‘Will the Census Bureau listen to the growing consensus on this issue, or will it cling to its outdated and misguided way of counting people in prisons and jails in 2030?’”

The provisions ending prison gerrymandering in the state were initially introduced as standalone measures and were rolled into this omnibus election bill.

Avoiding carveouts in prison gerrymandering reforms

Carveouts that exclude certain incarcerated people from bills to end prison gerrymandering undermine their impact and continue to distort democracy.

During the House debate on the measure, a representative introduced an amendment to limit the impact of the reforms by continuing to count people who have served ten consecutive years in prison or have over a decade remaining on their sentence at the prison. Fortunately, this poison-pill amendment was rejected, but it explains why other states considering similar reforms should also avoid this type of carveout.

Misguided amendments like this ignore the reality that, regardless of an incarcerated person’s sentence length, they are still not a member of the prison community. Additionally, nationally 75% of people in prison serve time in more than one facility, while 12% of people serve time in at least five facilities before returning home. These amendments also assume that a person will serve their full sentence and that sentencing policies or release mechanisms in a given state will remain static over a ten-year period, two things that are far from certain.

States shouldn’t undermine their own progress on this issue. When they end prison gerrymandering, they should ensure those reforms include all people incarcerated in the state’s prisons.

(expand)

Most states have clauses in their constitutions or statutes that explicitly say that prisons are not a residence — whether someone is incarcerated away from home for a few months or a few decades — yet the Census Bureau continues to count people as if they are. The Census Bureau has the authority to change how it counts incarcerated people and officially end prison gerrymandering at the national level, but inaction has forced state and local officials to pass reforms and shoulder the burden of correcting flawed Census redistricting data to count incarcerated people at home.

In addition to Minnesota, eighteen other states — including “red” states like Montana, “blue” states like New York, and “purple” states like Maine — have recognized the impact of prison gerrymandering on political representation and have taken action to provide more equal representation to their residents. Progress on this issue has been so swift that the staunchly bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures recently called the movement to end prison gerrymandering “the fastest-growing trend in redistricting.”

With Minnesota adding itself to this rapidly growing trend, there is yet another reason for the Census Bureau to finally change how it counts incarcerated people and end prison gerrymandering nationwide.

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The post Legislative Spotlight: SB494 appeared first on Voting Access For All.

Help us put an end to prison gerrymandering!

The updated bill (SB494) that would count incarcerated people at their home address pre-incarceration will be discussed in committee today.

Please find out more about this issue and how you can help us stop prison gerrymandering https://forms.gle/NxqshYhPg9AaAABW7

VAAC – Voting Access for All
Voters Not Politicians
Michigan Collaborative to End Mass Incarceration

The post Prison Gerrymandering Bill Needs Support appeared first on Voting Access For All.

**Support Requested**

End Prison Gerrymandering in Michigan

We need your support to end prison gerrymandering in Michigan.

Michigan Senate Bill 494 is a step towards ensuring fair representation for all. We are proud to stand alongside the VAAC – Voting Access for All (VAAC), Voters Not Politicians, and other partners in support of this crucial legislation.

Join us in calling on our state legislators to support this bill by adding your name to the sign on letter.

STATEMENT:

The Voting Access for All Coalition (VAAC), Voters Not Politicians, the Michigan Collaborative to End Mass Incarceration (MI-CEMI), and our partners encourage support of Michigan Senate Bill 0033 to end prison gerrymandering. 

SB494 would use a person’s pre-incarceration address as their home address for the purpose of establishing voting districts. If passed, Michigan would join 14 states with laws or policies that end prison gerrymandering.

The Prison Gerrymandering Project of the Prison Policy Initiative notes, “The way the Census Bureau counts people in prison creates significant problems for the fairness of our nation’s democracy. When the Census Bureau counts incarcerated people in prison instead of at home, there is a dramatic distortion of representation at local and state levels”.

We agree with the findings of the Brennan Center for Justice that, “When states draw districts without reallocating people who are incarcerated, they ignore the reality of the relationship between these individuals and the areas where prisons are located. Lawmakers who represent those areas often do not feel the same responsibility toward people in prison that they do for their other constituents and generally do not inquire about their welfare or represent their interests. Incarcerated individuals have much more meaningful connections to their home communities and the lawmakers who represent those areas, some of whom even perform constituent services on their behalf. But those areas see their representation in legislative bodies diluted, while areas with prisons receive more than their fair share.”

We call on our state legislators to ensure fair democratic representation is fully realized across Michigan, particularly for communities most impacted by the criminal legal system, by passing SB0033.

Contact: Chuck Warpehoski | Program Director, Michigan Collaborative to End Mass Incarceration | chuckw@mi-cemi.org

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Michigan is working on ending Prison Gerrymandering in our state and you can help by taking action HERE. Maine is latest state to end prison gerrymandering!

From our colleagues at the Prison Policy Initiative:

For more than two decades, we’ve led a national campaign to end prison gerrymandering, a problem that distorts political representation and hinders criminal justice reform. It is a problem created because the Census Bureau counts incarcerated people as if they were residents of the correctional facility rather than at their homes. When state and local governments use that data to draw new districts, it dilutes the voices of communities already hit hardest by mass incarceration. We have another big win to share!

Maine becomes the latest state to end prison gerrymandering

New law, sponsored by Speaker of the House Rachel Talbot Ross, ensures people in state prison are counted for redistricting at the same place they vote.

On Friday, Maine Governor Janet Mills signed LD 1704/HP 1093 into law, officially ending prison gerrymandering in state legislative districts by counting incarcerated people at their home addresses for redistricting purposes. With this measure, sponsored by Speaker of the House Rachel Talbot Ross, Maine is one of 17 states that have addressed this issue to create fairer legislative representation.

Prison gerrymandering is a problem created by the Census Bureau counting incarcerated people as residents of their prison cells rather than in their home communities during the decennial count. This practice artificially inflates the populations of areas that contain prisons, giving these areas additional political clout when state and local governments use this Census data to draw new district lines every ten years. Reforms, like Maine’s, allow state officials to adjust their redistricting data to count people in prison at their pre-incarceration address, giving a more accurate picture of the area’s population and more equal representation in government.

This victory in Maine is particularly noteworthy as the state is one of two that allows people in prison to vote. People in Maine prisons register and vote at their pre-incarceration address. The reform signed last week aligns the state’s redistricting laws with these voting laws.

The new law also ensures that redistricting data reflects the community ties of incarcerated people. While someone may be incarcerated away from home on Census Day, they remain a member of their home communities. In fact, for most people who are away from home for long times, the Census Bureau recognizes the importance of family and community ties and counts them at home (e.g., truck drivers, boarding school students, members of Congress, military personnel) but fails to apply the same rules to incarcerated people. Maine has just ensured that incarcerated people and communities hit hardest by mass incarceration are treated the same as everyone else for redistricting purposes.

“Maine is the latest state to reject the flawed way that the Census Bureau counts incarcerated people,” said Aleks Kajstura, Legal Director of the Prison Policy Initiative. “This measure is another piece of evidence of the growing consensus among the states on prison gerrymandering. One big question remains: will the Census Bureau listen to these states and change how it counts incarcerated people, or will it stubbornly dig in its heels and continue to force governments to modify redistricting data to make it usable?”

While it may seem like the 2030 Census is a long time from now, by passing this legislation this year, Maine will have enough time to collect the data necessary to ensure it can successfully count incarcerated people at their homes during its next redistricting period, a practice other states considering this reform should follow.

Roughly half the country now lives in a place that has addressed prison gerrymandering, with more than 200 local governments and 17 states tackling the issue. Progress on this issue has been so rapid that the National Conference of State Legislatures, a strictly bipartisan organization that assists state lawmakers on policy issues, recently called state efforts to end prison gerrymandering “the fastest-growing trend in redistricting.”

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