Michigan bill aims to end 'prison gerrymandering' before 2020 census

Proposed legislation would change how Michigan's prisoners are counted in legislative and congressional districts, a move that researchers say could shift political power away from rural areas that claim a significant number of incarcerated people as constituents.

Senate Bill 759 aims to end the practice of counting prisoners as residents in the districts where they're currently incarcerated, which critics call "prison gerrymandering."

The bill, introduced by Sen. Sylvia Santana, D-Detroit, would require that prisoners' last-known addresses be used when establishing voting districts. Santana said the change is necessary to draw districts "of equal and fair proportions."

“Prisoners are people, too, and they should be counted in their home communities if we are to build a truly representative democracy," she said.

Like prisoners in all states except Maine and Vermont, the roughly 38,000 people serving time in Michigan Department of Corrections facilities cannot vote.

Advocates argue that counting prisoners in the districts where they're incarcerated, even though they're not part of surrounding community and cannot vote, unfairly boosts the populations of those areas.

"Communities with prisons have their political power inflated because their populations are inflated because of people who are in prison, and other communities see their votes sort of diluted," said Cara Brumfield, senior policy analyst for the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality’s Economic Security and Opportunity Initiative.

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Political districts are redrawn every 10 years after the census. Santana hopes to change the law by April 1, designated as Census Day, when the U.S. Census Bureau says every home should have received an invitation to participate in the census.

Santana's legislation stands to have the greatest effect on state House districts that claim a high percentage of prisoners as constituents, said Aleks Kajstura, legal director of the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit advocating to count incarcerated people as residents of their home addresses.

"There would be less representational power concentrated in these few districts that have these huge incarcerated populations," she said. "There wouldn't be anywhere in the state that would gain the same amount of power that these districts lost."

There were three House districts drawn after the 2010 census that claimed prisoners as more than 5% of their population, Kajstura said.

Just more than 7% of people in District 70 were incarcerated when the mid-Michigan district was drawn after the 2010 census, according to Kajstura. That district is represented by Rep. Jim Lower, R-Greenville, who said Thursday that he didn't have enough information to form an opinion on Santana's bill. He added that voter turnout in his district, which includes three prisons in Montcalm and Gratiot counties, is low compared to surrounding areas.

It's unlikely that the proposal would have a significant effect on congressional districts. It wouldn't affect elections at the municipal or county levels because state law excludes state prisoners from being counted for representation purposes.

Advocates have been fighting for years for the U.S. Census Bureau to change its longstanding practice of counting prisoners as residents of the district where they're incarcerated.

The bureau hasn't altered its policy, but seven states have passed legislation similar to Santana's bill. After the census count, those states will adjust the data to reallocate incarcerated people for redistricting. Similar legislation is pending in eight other states, Kajstura said.

A state-level change to where Michigan's prisoners are counted would have no bearing on the distribution of federal funds for services and infrastructure because funding formulas don't use redistricting data, Kajstura said.

Angie Jackson covers the challenges of formerly incarcerated citizens as a corps member with Report for America, an initiative of The GroundTruth Project, with support from the Hudson-Webber Foundation. Click here to support her work. Contact Angie: ajackson@freepress.com; 313-222-1850. Follow her on Twitter: @AngieJackson23