From Prison Policy Initiative:
On Friday the 2030 Census Advisory Committee held their inaugural meeting and voted to put prison gerrymandering on its agenda. (That’s actually more exciting than it sounds.) The recommendation to discuss the topic in depth was both in reaction to a public comment submitted to the Committee by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights on behalf of its prison gerrymandering working group, as well as Committee members’ own expertise identifying prison gerrymandering as an issue that needs to be addressed for the 2030 Census.
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. The Census Bureau has a persistent undercount of Black and Latino communities — communities that have also historically been hardest hit by mass incarceration — meaning that counting incarcerated people as if they resided at facilities far from home compounds the Bureau’s undercounts of their home communities. Continue reading >>>
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