In recent years, the concept of gerrymandering has entered the mainstream political conversation — particularly as it relates to toying with voting population percentages, a strategy which Republicans have put to especially effective use. (Though it’s not exclusive to the right, and there are signs that its advantage may be starting to fray.)

Named for 18th-century Vice President Elbridge Gerry, to “gerrymander” is to bureaucratically distort the geographic boundaries of a voting district, cutting across lines of population concentrations so that, for instance, Republican voters in that district will make up a majority that was not present in the previous boundary overlay. In districts where one might expect rectangles, instead, thanks to such manipulation, boundary geometries can be warped to farcical extremes. (Gerry’s meddling with a Boston district was said to produce a map the shape of a salamander, hence the portmanteau word — a term as unwieldy and strange as the often-preposterous districts to which it refers.) The abuse of power that gerrymandering represents has been an ongoing concern, particularly as Republicans have become increasingly brazen about wheeling out the patently self-serving strategy during each once-a-decade redistricting cycle. The consequences have been far-ranging for U.S. democracy (and the lack thereof).

The United States, though, is home to injustices that extend far beyond this election-rigging. The bipartisan project of mass incarceration has swept up enormous swaths of the population, disproportionately people of color — with the result that the country now exceeds all other nations in total prisoner numbers. Until recently, that was true both of the raw number and the per-capita rate. (The latter has apparently fluctuated since a 2019-2020, partly COVID-related drop; the total-number first-place status remains in place.)

Prison gerrymandering is a distinct issue that lies at the intersection of these and other processes. It specifically refers to the lopsided voting-bloc distortions that can occur when individuals are counted as residents of the district that harbors the prison in which they are currently incarcerated, rather than their original home locality. In the current model, districts that contain prisons receive an undue boost in population, meaning that the vote of every free citizen in the district is effectively granted an outsized weighting. By extension, other territories, especially those with populations diminished by their residents’ mass incarceration in those very same prisons, now find that their democratic participation counts, comparatively, even less.

The nonpartisan nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) is the most prominent organization engaged in directly combating prison gerrymandering. Since 2001, the PPI has led a nationwide campaign to put an end to the practice, alongside other significant work combating the socially catastrophic injustices of mass incarceration.

“Prison gerrymandering is a problem created because the Census Bureau counts incarcerated people in the wrong place. It counts them as residents of a prison cell, rather than their home communities,” PPI Communications Director Mike Wessler told Truthout. Counting prisoners as a prison district’s home residents in this way, first and foremost, deprives prisoners themselves of the adequate democratic representation they are due.

“[T]hey don’t have social ties to the prison community, they’re not likely to stay there when they’re released, they’re not likely to be in that prison for more than a couple years at a time, and they don’t really consider themselves members of that community,” Wessler said. “They’re not reaching out to lawmakers there to make their voice heard. The places that they feel connected to are the places they’re most likely to return to after they leave, which is their home communities: where they came from.”

This is a weighty issue of democratic rights. As the Campaign Legal Center points out, while almost all those........

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