Prisoner Reallocation
The U.S. Census counts prisoners as residents of the prison they are located in. Prisoner reallocation is the process of adjusting the census data used in redistricting so that prisoners are counted at their previous home address as opposed to the prison. While not a requirement, some states have elected to reallocate prisoners before redrawing maps as prison populations are quickly becoming a representational issue for voters.
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Prison Gerrymandering: Currently the U.S. Census Bureau considers the prison as the residence of an inmate. This means that there are a large group of non-eligible voters (in most states) who reside at one address the state. Prison gerrymandering is the term given this common situation in the states; large concentrations of nonvoting inmates in state and local election districts. Many believe that this distorts the voting and representation rights of many voters.
Consider the more extreme example of Anamosa, Iowa. The Prison Policy Initiative, a national advocacy group dedicated to eradicating prison gerrymandering, notes a city council district in Anamosa, which features a prison and just a handful of registered voters. Because the local council district had only a handful of voters – the rest of the population on record being the prison inmates, one local councilman won his seat with just two votes. The rest of the council members were required to compete for their seats in districts comprised of 1,400 voters on average. The end result of Anamosa’s predicament is that the weight of a voter’s vote in the district where the prison is located is 24 times as much as a typical voter in the remaining districts. The city has since changed its procedure to end this situation.
To some degree, this distortion is present anywhere a state or local government counts inmates as part of the population in a district. The result is a trend among states where rural districts with prisons are to some degree over-represented in the legislature, especially when compared to urban regions. New York debated this very issue earlier in the decade. According to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, 66% of New York’s prisoners came from New York City but 91% resided in prisons in upstate NY.
Prison Policy Initiative: How Prison-based Gerrymandering Changes District Lines (An illustrated explanation of how prison-based gerrymandering changes district lines based on districts drawn in New York State after the 2000 Census.)
Prisoner Reallocation: The answer to the distortion caused by counting prison inmates as part of a district’s population during redistricting is to simply count them as if they were residents at their pre-incarceration address. This counting method eliminates the large concentration of non-voting individuals within an election district, whether it be a congressional, state legislative or local council district.
Implementing prisoner reallocation requires a significant amount of collaboration between agencies and authorities at the state and local level. In most cases, states must “adjust” the decennial redistricting data file (P.L. 94-171) provided by the Census Bureau. This “adjusted data” subtracts prisoners from the census block the prison is located in and relocates the individual to the census block containing their last known street address.
Maryland in 2010, was the first state in the country to adopt a prisoner reallocation policy for redistricting statewide.
As of March 2020, eight states have passed laws that modify how prisoners are counted and allocated during the redistricting process. They are: California, Colorado, Delaware, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Virginia and Washington.
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