November’s elections will be the first time voters in Wilmington, Delaware, cast their ballots in city council districts that aren’t distorted by the location of prisons.
That’s because the city decided after the last census to abolish a long-standing practice sometimes known as “prison gerrymandering,” in which people in prison are counted as residents of the places where they’re incarcerated rather than where they’re actually from.
Under the new law, people incarcerated at state correctional facilities located in Wilmington were counted based on their last known address in the city, rather than as residents of the city council district where the facilities are located. Those who last lived outside of the city were not counted at all.
More than a dozen states and scores of municipalities like Wilmington have made moves on their own in recent years to end prison gerrymandering. But the U.S. Census Bureau has resisted pressure to do the same. So activists and lawmakers are pushing to ensure that more state and local governments make the change themselves in time for the next redistricting process, just six years away.
Prison gerrymandering is a result of the Census Bureau’s “usual residence” rule, under which the government counts people as living in the place where they primarily eat and sleep on the day the once-per-decade census is conducted. As a result, people in prison are considered residents of the district in which they are incarcerated, rather than where they lived before being locked up.
Since political representation is based on population, the practice siphons political power away from the largely urban and minority communities that most incarcerated people come from, and inflates the political power of the mainly white, rural areas where prisons tend to be located, according to activists fighting to end the practice.
At least 200 cities and counties have addressed the issue in their local redistricting efforts as well, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.
But that success doesn’t mean there aren’t obstacles to changing how people in prison are counted.
For starters, activists say, legislators and the public need to be educated about the impacts of prison gerrymandering.
“There’s a lot of misconceptions around the whole census process,” said Kim Murphy-Kovalick, programs director at Voters Not Politicians, which is working to end prison gerrymandering in Michigan.
For instance, many legislators believe that removing incarcerated people from districts’ population counts will lead to those districts getting fewer federal dollars, according to advocates like Murphy-Kovalick. But that isn’t the case, since the allocation of federal money to the states is a lot more nuanced and is based on far more than just population numbers, advocates say.
This story was originally published by Law 360. Read more here: https://www.law360.com/access-to-justice/articles/1890732/the-push-to-end-prison-gerrymandering-gains-momentum
