From Prison Policy Initiative:
In a new report from the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), state governments have a clear message for the Census Bureau: You created prison gerrymandering, you need to fix it.
The report examines state implementation of prison gerrymandering reforms after the 2020 census. Prison gerrymandering is a problem created by the Census Bureau’s policy of counting incarcerated people as residents of prison cells rather than their home communities. When states use those Census counts to draw legislative districts, they unintentionally distort political representation by unfairly giving people who live closest to prisons a louder voice in government, to the detriment of everyone else. To fix this problem, more than a dozen states had to adjust Census redistricting data to count incarcerated people at home after the 2020 census.
Based on interviews of redistricting officials in the 13 states that addressed prison gerrymandering when drawing new state legislative lines after the 2020 census, the report gives insights into the challenges they faced in implementing these reforms and offers recommendations to overcome those obstacles. The report makes clear that state officials recognize this problem is important, worth fixing, and the Bureau should do the fixing.
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