A prison can boost a state legislative district’s population, even in places where prisoners cannot vote—which is almost everywhere in America
was 17 years old when he went to prison in 1991. For the next 27 years he was incarcerated in several state prisons in Pennsylvania. He was imprisoned atGreene, a supermax prison in the south-western corner of the state, during the 2010 census. Since 1790, the Census Bureau—which began its decennial count on April 1st—has registered incarcerated people as residents of the counties where their prisons are located, not the last address before their arrest.
The lawsuit asserts that prison gerrymandering has two unconstitutional effects. First, it inflates the political power of the voters in counties with prisons, mainly in rural, mostly white districts. Second, it dilutes the political power of voters in the incarcerated person’s urban home district. Pennsylvania’s prison population is predominantly black or Latino and comes from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
A 2018 study by Brianna Remster and Rory Kramer, two Villanova University sociologists, found that if prison-based gerrymandering were done away with and the incarcerated were counted where they lived before they went to prison, several districts with prisons would lose representation and several urban districts would gain it. Their research showed a “substantial likelihood” that Philadelphia would gain an additional majority-minority district in the state house.
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