In Ohio and across the country, anti-gerrymandering groups are trying to correct what they say is a representational error in redistricting based on the prison population.
Currently, inmates in the nation’s state and federal prisons are counted in the U.S. Census every ten years as residents of the county their facility is located in. Groups like Common Cause and the Prison Policy Initiative are calling on the U.S. Census Bureau and, failing that, other government agencies to change this policy.
“When you design a policy that is going to last for decades, you want to make sure it’s as fair as possible,” says Catherine Turcer, director of Common Cause Ohio.
The national Common Cause Education Fund, in collaboration with the PPI sent a letter to U.S. Census Bureau Director Robert Santos and other agency leaders, requesting that the Bureau suspend its current census data privacy practices, which they say have resulted in “unnecessary inaccuracies” in the data sets used for the most recent redistricting cycle and have had “adverse effects,” particularly on correctional population data.
The Census Bureau’s method involves “intentionally inserting inaccurate information” to protect population data, but some of that data is still subject to miscounts, Common Cause and the PPI said.
In addition to the inaccuracies the group criticized in the privacy-protection methodology used in the census data sets, “the bureau continues to interpret its residency rule to count inmates as residents of their prison cells rather than their home communities,” said the letter, signed by PPI legal director Aleks Kajstura and Common Cause justice and democracy manager Keshia Morris Desir.
“When states use census data to create new state or local districts, they inadvertently give residents of counties with prisons more political power than any other resident of the state,” Kajstura and Desir write.
Counting incarcerated persons as residents of the district in which they are housed raises problems not only with regard to the representation of the incarcerated person, but also with regard to the district and municipality in which they live when they are not serving a sentence.
Moreover, most of these sentences last less than a decade, meaning the data is inaccurate even before the next census, but only after districts are drawn and resources allocated, advocates say.
Ohio’s prisons are located in rural areas rather than urban areas. The Ohio Office of Prisons maintains facilities in Ashtabula, Richland, Union, Madison, Pickaway, Fairfield, Ross, Noble and Scioto counties. There are also correctional facilities in Franklin, Marion, Montgomery, Lorain, Cuyahoga, Trumbull and Mahoning counties, according to the office.
And while changing the incarceration count wouldn’t necessarily impact prison funding, it would change representation and the people who can interact with elected officials.
“It takes some representation from every community where there are incarcerated people,” says Mike Wessler, communications director for the Prison Policy Initiative, which continues to manage the Prison Gerrymandering Project to advocate for better redistricting and census processes for incarcerated people.
Wessler said counting prison inmates as residents of the county where the prison is located also reduces the influence that residents of the counties where prisons are located can have on policy issues.
For example, Ohio’s 12th House District population is 7% incarcerated, according to PPI counts.
“That means 93 people in this district have the same power as 100 people in another district,” Wessler said.
And even though these inmates are counted as residents of prison districts in census data, elected officials may not count them as part of the population to which they are accountable.
“Almost everyone who represents a prison district has not considered the incarcerated as part of their constituency,” Wessler told the OCJ.
Even if the U.S. Census Bureau does not change its methods, state and local governments have their own ways to change population representation. The U.S. has 14 states According to PPI, they want to change the way they draw districts to revise census data that assigns inmates to their home county rather than where they are incarcerated. Ohio could be on that list if voters approve redistricting in November.
As part of the constitutional amendment drafted by Citizens Not Politicians, the 15-member Citizens’ Redistricting Commission would be required to “provide that persons in the custody of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections or its successor agency be counted at their last known address prior to incarceration for population equalization purposes,” the amendment states.
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