Everyone in Texas is supposed to have an equal voice in their government’s decisions, but an outdated and misguided Census Bureau policy that counts incarcerated people in the wrong place gives a few residents of the state a megaphone. It is a problem known as prison gerrymandering, and Texas lawmakers can fix it.

Texas Blindly Follows Outdated Bureaucratic Federal Policy

Every ten years, when the Census Bureau conducts its official tally of the nation’s population, it incorrectly counts incarcerated people as residents of prison cells rather than in their home communities. This is despite the fact that they usually are not from the prison town, have no family or social ties there, likely won’t stay there for long, and state residence law says they’re not residents there. When state officials then use that incorrect Census data in the legislative redistricting process, they inadvertently inflate the populations of those areas — in violation of constitutional principles of equal representation. This gives residents of state legislative districts that contain correctional facilities a particularly loud voice in government, allowing them to have an outsized influence on debates about immigration enforcement, property taxes, schools, gun control, and more, at the expense of nearly every other person in the state.

To ensure equal representation, states across the country have taken steps to fix this problem that the Census Bureau created. But, Texas is one of the remaining states still suffering from this “prison gerrymandering.” While the 2030 Census count is still years away, Texas needs to act now to avoid prison gerrymandering the next time it redraws its districts.

Prison Gerrymandering Significantly Distorts Texas’s State Legislative Districts

In Texas, there are two state House districts that powerfully illustrate how prisons distort district populations and give some residents a louder voice in government as a result of prison gerrymandering.

In these two House of Representatives districts —districts 12 and 8 — correctional facilities account for a significant portion of the population. In District 12, for example, correctional facilities make up 10% of the population. That means that just 90 residents of that district have as much political clout as 100 residents in other districts. That imbalance in representation comes from the state choosing to redistrict based on Census numbers that don’t match the reality of where people live.

Read the full article about prison gerrymandering in Texas by Aleks Kajstura at Prison Policy Initiative.