[The issue of prison gerrymandering has existed since the census
was first taken, but became more noticeable in the late 1970s and
early 1980s alongside the explosion in prison populations.]
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CENSUS CORRECTIONS SHOW HOW SOUTHERN COMMUNITIES BENEFIT FROM PRISONS
 
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Maydha Devarajan
February 24, 2023
Facing South
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_ The issue of prison gerrymandering has existed since the census was
first taken, but became more noticeable in the late 1970s and early
1980s alongside the explosion in prison populations. _

, Graphic from the Prison Policy Initiative.

 

In January, the U.S. Census Bureau released its first round of
corrections
[[link removed]] for
the 2020 population count. Among these corrections were revised counts
for municipalities in Southern states where geographic
boundary-related errors occurred, misplacing prisons. 

In Arkansas, Georgia, and Tennessee, these misplaced prisons meant
some towns saw an increase to original population counts by thousands
of people. In the town of Whiteville, Tennessee, the census
count jumped from 2,606 to more than 4,500
[[link removed]] when
the population of a correctional facility was counted back after
previously being attributed to another area in 2020, according to
Stateline
[[link removed]],
an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts.

For these corrections, the Census Bureau uses a process called
the Count Question Resolution (CQR) operation
[[link removed]],
in which elected officials from tribal, state, and local governments
can file a challenge and request a review of the census count for
their jurisdiction if they suspect an error with boundary or housing
counts. Annual population estimates can have significant political
impacts in the form of redistricting and electoral representation. 

Across the U.S. today, nearly 2 million people
[[link removed]] are incarcerated,
with most losing the right to vote at least temporarily under
state felony disenfranchisement laws
[[link removed]].
When it comes to the census, the way the Bureau counts prisoners —
in the places they are imprisoned as opposed to the communities where
they lived before their incarceration — is part of a process some
deem as "prison gerrymandering"
[[link removed]] for
how it distorts political representation.

A number of states and local governments have taken some action
towards addressing prison gerrymandering over the past few decades.
While advocates for reform applaud the strides made, they also
underscore a need for additional change to achieve what they see as
equitable democratic representation. 

What is prison gerrymandering?

Since the first U.S. census in 1790, individuals have been counted at
their "usual residence," defined as the place where a person sleeps
and lives most of the time. Prisons fall under "group quarters," a
term the Census Bureau attributes to places with relatively transient
populations like college dorms, nursing homes, and military
barracks. 

The issue of prison gerrymandering has existed since the census was
first taken, but became more noticeable in the late 1970s and early
1980s alongside the explosion in prison populations, said Mike
Wessler, communications director for Prison Policy Initiative
[[link removed]] (PPI), a nonprofit founded to
document the impacts of mass incarceration.

At the local level, prison gerrymandering can result in what Wessler
called "paralyzing impacts." He pointed to the infamous example of
Anamosa, Iowa, where in 2008 a local man was elected to city
council after receiving just two votes
[[link removed]] —
both write-ins — from his wife and a neighbor. The man's ward had
around the same population as neighboring areas, but it was home to
about 1,300 individuals who were incarcerated within the state's
largest penitentiary and thus unable to vote.  
 
"The residents who live closest to those prisons are getting
disproportionate clout in political decisions, not just at the voting
box," Wessler said. "Obviously prison gerrymandering is a problem that
impacts voting, but we think of it as a problem that impacts
representation more broadly." 

Critics of prison gerrymandering point to how counting incarcerated
individuals where they are imprisoned as opposed to their home
communities skews population counts towards the rural, typically
whiter communities where state prisons tend to be concentrated. For
example, a 2017 paper
[[link removed]] from
the Center for Administrative Records Research and Applications found
that a disproportionate share of prisons and inmates are situated in
rural areas, while a disproportionate share of inmates hail from
urban areas. 

At the same time, people from Black and Brown communities are
incarcerated at disproportionately higher rates than their white
counterparts. According to a 2021 report
[[link removed]] from
The Sentencing Project, Black Americans are imprisoned in state
facilities at almost 5 times the rate of white Americans, while the
rate for Latinx individuals is 1.3 times that of white people.  

The rural, predominantly white town of Calico Rock, Arkansas, is
another community that saw its population count more than double
[[link removed]] as
a result of the first round of 2020 census corrections, increasing
from 888 individuals to 1,815. Those corrections included adding back
in the population of the North Central Unit prison, which has a
capacity of 800 prisoners. While Black Arkansans make up around 15%
of the state's total population
[[link removed]], they
constitute 41% of the state's overall prison population.
[[link removed]]

Similarly, the Georgia municipalities of Chester and Glennville had
population gains of 161% and 38%, respectively, based on census
appeals that moved state prisons back into their population counts
[[link removed]].
Unlike many communities that benefit from prison gerrymanders, Chester
is majority-Black. 

Alison Wright, who heads up the Data Center Division with
the Arkansas Economic Development Institute [[link removed]],
noted that misplaced prison populations can have a significant impact
on smaller municipalities. 

"Depending on what city you're in, they (prisons) do make a big
difference if they don't get counted," Wright said. 

Mitchell Brown, voting rights senior counsel with the
nonprofit Southern Coalition for Social Justice
[[link removed]] (SCSJ), sees education and advocacy
as key to addressing prison gerrymandering. For example, SCSJ
partnered with Democracy North Carolina and PPI on a 2021
letter-writing campaign encouraging lawmakers across the South to
exclude prisoners from redistricting data. 

Under prison gerrymandering, incarcerated populations are treated "as
pawns in an electoral game," Brown observed. 

"You have a group of people that are invisible on one hand but then
used as a pawn on the other," he said. "That is all due to prison
gerrymandering. And so the more people know about that, I think the
more reform we can make."

Changes ahead

Across the country, Wessler says 16 states and over 200 local
governments have taken some action on prison gerrymandering reform.

At the state level, Virginia passed legislation
[[link removed]] in
2020 that ensured prisoners would be counted at their last-known
addresses as new legislative districts are drawn. The following year
the Virginia Supreme Court rejected a challenge
[[link removed]] to
that law brought by individuals including Virginia state Sen. Travis
Hackworth (R), who argued that inmates should be counted as residents
of the prisons where they are housed. Hackworth's
district, population 184,289
[[link removed]],
is home to five state prisons: Bland Correctional Center (population
572 as of December 2022), Keen Mountain Correctional Center (910),
Pocahontas State Correctional Center (947), Red Onion State Prison
(728), and Wallens Ridge State Prison (1,004).

In Tennessee, lawmakers have passed legislation
[[link removed]] allowing
counties to exclude prison populations in drawing district lines. And
a number of local governments in Southern states
[[link removed]] including Alabama,
Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North
Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas have taken measures to avoid
prison gerrymandering practices in some way, whether by "ignoring the
prison population, cutting a hole in their maps around the prison,
overpopulating the district with the prison by the exact amount of the
prison population, or splitting the prison population between all
districts equally," according to PPI.

"It's kind of a pivot point for the country and inflection point where
the choices that state and local leaders, in particular, make will
really decide whether or not we turn the page on the failed experiment
of mass incarceration or continue down this path that harms
communities of color, harms urban communities, and harms rural
communities," Wessler said.

But Wessler sees the ultimate solution to prison gerrymandering as
residing with the Census Bureau, saying the government agency should
change how it counts incarcerated people. 

"Anything short of that is going to be kind of an imperfect solution,"
he said. "States are working hard, jumping through lots of hoops to
make sure that their legislative lines align with true representation.
But there's certain gaps that they can't fill."

David Ayala is the executive director of Formerly Incarcerated,
Convicted People and Families Movement
[[link removed]] (FICPFM), a national network of more than
50 human and civil rights groups led by individuals with conviction
histories and their families. Among the issues that FICPFM advocates
for is the enfranchisement of convicted peoples and prison
gerrymandering reform.

Ayala, who has served time in correctional facilities, said it's
critical to prioritize prison gerrymandering as a criminal justice
issue because it impacts re-entry for imprisoned people. "To count a
person in an area that they will not be living in, it affects the
resources for them that they can receive when they are released back
into their communities," he said.

The CQR process does not mean the Census Bureau will collect new data
or that the official 2020 census results will be updated with revised
counts. However, the process does allow the Bureau to redistribute
corrected population counts
[[link removed]] to
government entities impacted by errors. 

Ahead of the 2020 count, the Census Bureau solicited feedback
regarding its residence criteria and received close to 78,000 public
comments, the majority of which suggested
[[link removed]] imprisoned
people should be counted at their home addresses. In response, the
Bureau stated in 2018 that counting prisoners anywhere else apart from
their correctional facility wouldn't be consistent with the notion of
usual residence, "since the majority of people in prisons live and
sleep most of the time at the prison." 

But the Bureau also noted that some states may "move" incarcerated
populations back to pre-incarceration addresses in legislative
redistricting, and instituted a one-time process called the 2020
Post-Census Group Quarters Review
[[link removed]] (PCGQR)
for governmental units to request reviews of 2020 population counts
for group quarters. The deadline for submitting a challenge is June
30, 2023. 

The Census Bureau has stated that if the inconsistencies in 2020
population counts are found for a group quarters facility through the
PCGQR, certified updates to the count will be supplied to the
Population Estimates Program. These population estimates are used
[[link removed]] in
critical statistical surveys like the American Community Survey, which
various agencies and policymakers use for community planning
purposes. 

Ultimately, when counting populations, it's crucial to consider the
social ties a person has to a community, Wessler said. Once released,
imprisoned individuals, though they may be used to pad population
counts under the system of prison gerrymandering, aren't guaranteed to
stay in or necessarily feel connected to a community where they were
incarcerated.

"I don't think anyone would argue that somebody who's locked behind a
prison wall is a member of that community that the prison happens to
be in," Wessler said. "That's not where they consider home."

_MAYDHA DEVARAJAN is the 2023 Julian Bond Fellow at Facing South. She
previously worked as a reporter for the Chatham News + Record and as a
metro reporting intern at the Raleigh News & Observer. Maydha has also
served as a research intern with UNC-Chapel Hill's Southern Oral
History Program and the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in
Local Media._

_FACING SOUTH is the online magazine and weekly email update
[[link removed]] of the
Institute for Southern Studies, featuring investigative reporting and
in-depth analysis of trends across the South. Facing South has earned
a national reputation for exposing abuses of power, holding powerful
interests accountable, and elevating the voices of everyday people
working for change in the South._

_Facing South was launched as an email newsletter in 2000 by
the Institute for Southern Studies
[[link removed]], a research,
media, and education center based in Durham, North Carolina. From 1973
to 2010, the Institute published the award-winning print journal
Southern Exposure._

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* Prisons
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* census
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* Gerrymandering
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* voting
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* voting rights
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* Racism
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* Inequality
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