End Prison Gerrymandering
Prison gerrymandering occurs when imprisoned people are counted as residents of the locations where they are imprisoned, rather than at their pre-incarceration homes, when drawing electoral districts.
The result? A skewed democracy that deepens inequities for justice-impacted populations. These communities lose political voice, while prison towns gain influence from residents who can’t vote.
Incarcerated people are often taken far away from home to serve their sentence. The practice of prison gerrymandering artificially inflates the population where the prison is located, and therefore the political power, of rural, majority white communities, and diminishes representation of more diverse, and often urban, communities from which many incarcerated individuals come from.
A recent analysis by the nonprofit advocacy group Prison Policy Initiative found that one-third of the roughly 55,000 incarcerated people in Michigan jails and prisons were counted as residents of facilities in just three state House districts during the last redistricting cycle. As a reminder, incarcerated people in Michigan cannot vote, and because of prison gerrymandering, their voice is essentially assigned to the local rural population. Not only is this unfair, but it goes against the fundamental notion that we all have an equal voice in our government.
Incarcerated people overwhelmingly return to their pre-incarceration community when they finish serving their sentences, and do not stay in the one where they were imprisoned. When their votes are counted in the prison’s district instead of their home district, it robs their true communities of vital resources. During resource allocation, prison towns benefit from increased funding for public schools, social services, local libraries, and even housing assistance — while the neighborhoods people actually return to are left behind. The Census Bureau should count incarcerated people at home in the 2030 Census using home address data to more accurately distribute community investments and political power.
We can take action to end prison gerrymandering in Michigan. Voting Access for All Coalition (VAAC) and allied advocates support legislation — specifically Senate Bill 33 of 2023 — to address this imbalance in representation. The bill proposes counting incarcerated individuals at their addresses prior to incarceration for redistricting purposes. Michigan law already prohibits local governments from counting inmates when drawing new political boundaries for city or commission seats, so this seeks to extend that standard to state and congressional districts. This would counteract the distortion created by current counting practices and address the imbalance between rural and urban representation.
We’ve already seen over eighteen other states enact similar legislation. Our Midwest neighbors in Minnesota and Illinois are preparing for the implementation of similar policy in the 2030 redistricting cycle. Other states, including Connecticut, California, Maryland, and New York, all applied reforms in the 2010 or 2020 redistricting cycle — and it worked! More than a dozen states took it upon themselves to end prison gerrymandering in 2020 and through this process they successfully redrew legislative districts that more accurately reflect actual resident populations.
Representation in government should reflect actual constituencies of voters and not be inflated by non-voting populations. It’s time for Michigan to take action and ensure that we have fair and accurate legislative maps.
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Angela Davenport, Executive Director — Voting Access for All Coalition
To learn more, check out the documentary Drawing the Line: Inside the Fight to End Prison Gerrymandering.
