The Prison Policy Initiative works to keep prisons from influencing elections

Since 2001, the Prison Policy Initiative has worked to expose and fix a once obscure Census Bureau glitch that undermines our democracy.

The Census Bureau counts people in prison as if they were residents of the communities where they are incarcerated, even though they remain legal residents of the places they lived prior to incarceration. As Census data is used to apportion political power at all levels of government, crediting thousands of disproportionately urban and minority men to other communities has staggering implications for modern American democracy.

In New York State, for example, one out of every three people who moved to upstate New York in the 1990s actually "moved" into a newly constructed prison. The State bars people in prison from voting, but their presence in the Census boosts the population of the upstate districts whose legislators favor prison expansion. Without this phantom population, 7 upstate New York State Senate districts would not meet minimum population requirements and would have to be redrawn.

Our 2002 report, Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York was the first district-by-district analysis of the impact of the prison miscount on state legislative redistricting and the first to suggest workable policy solutions.

In the years since, we've extended our New York research to examine how inaccurate Census data has caused democratic distortion in more than 11 states and 200 counties.

Prison Policy Initiative accomplishments

Our research and advocacy have made the prisoner miscount the central controversy of the 2010 Census. Our work has:

• been endorsed by the New York Times editorial board in 9 editorials.
• led the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to suggest that New York's practice of drawing legislative districts based on the Census data violates the Voting Rights Act.
• won the endorsement of the Census Bureau's technical advisors at the National Research Council of the National Academies.
• inspired state legislators in New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Illinois to draft reform legislation.
• launched a grassroots campaign with federal, state and local elected officials, democracy advocates and criminal justice reformers to change how the U.S. Census counts people in prison.