What is prison-based gerrymandering?

See a clip from the new documentary Gerrymandering by Jeff Reichert:

Maryland Governor signs first-in-nation law to count incarcerated people at home for redistricting purposes!

See the Demos and PPI press release:

• Maryland enacts law to count incarcerated people at their home addresses: First-in-nation law will improve fairness and accuracy of the Census data used for redistricting

Or read more about our research and advocacy in Maryland.

If you are new to our work and want to stay informed of new developments, you may want to subscribe to our weekly newsletter and join our Facebook group. —Peter Wagner

Welcome

The non-profit, non-partisan Prison Policy Initiative documents the impact of mass incarceration on individuals, communities, and the national welfare. We produce accessible and innovative research to empower the public to participate in improving criminal justice policy.

The Prison Policy Initiative is most famous for documenting the distortion in our democratic process caused by the Census Bureau counting people where they are confined, not where they come from. Our census work has:

• Been endorsed by the New York Times editorial board in 11 editorials, including Phantom Voters in New York, Prison-Based Gerrymandering, and Phantom Voters, Thanks to the Census.
• 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.

In addition to the Census, we have:

• Published The Geography of Punishment: How Huge Sentencing Enhancement Zones Harm Communities, Fail to Protect Children a groundbreaking report that demonstrates that a Massachusetts law that requires a mandatory sentence of at least two years for certain drug offenses committed within 1,000 feet of schools does not work to protect children from drugs and has the negative effect of increasing racial disparities in incarceration.
  
  The first of a kind report mapped every sentencing enhancement zone in urban, rural and suburban Hampden County, and quantified the race and ethnicity of the people who live inside and outside of the zones. We found that residents of urban areas are five times more likely to live in a sentencing enhancement zone than those in rural areas, and Latinos are more than twice as likely as Whites to live in a sentencing enhancement zone. We explored the wisdom of using a large distance of 1,000 feet for a geography based deterrent. We demonstrated that 1,000 feet is simply too large of a distance and the legislature erred assuming that everyone within 1,000 feet of a school can influence people at the school.
• Provide critical ongoing technical assistance to the Southern Center for Human Rights in Whitaker v. Perdue, which challenges Georgia’s ban on people on the sex offender registry from living within 1,000 feet of schools, churches and a long list of other places including school bus stops. Because almost every tract of habitable housing in Georgia is served by one of 350,000 school bus stops, the legislature unwittingly declared all urban areas, all surburban areas and most rural areas off limits. This law was so extreme that it merited opposition from many of the state’s sheriffs. We helped the Southern Center demonstrate in federal court that another flaw in the statute makes a lot of housing that is more than 1,000 feet from a protected area also off limits. Our analysis of Richmond County (Augusta, GA) is available on our site.
• Published, with the Western Prison Project, The Prison Index: Taking the Pulse of the Crime Control Industry, an accessible index of statistics about our nation’s criminal justice system.
• Created the widely used internet library of of empirical research about prisons and crime and we edit a self-updating list of legal resources for people in prison.