By Dale Ho, Assistant Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc.
Last week, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) issued a report entitled Captive Constituents: Prison-Based Gerrymandering and the Distortion of Our Democracy.
As our report explains, "prison-based gerrymandering" is a practice whereby many states and local governments count incarcerated persons as residents of the areas where they are housed when election district lines are drawn. This practice distorts our democratic process by artificially inflating the population count-and thus, the political influence-of the districts where prisons and jails are located. As a result, everyone living outside of those districts suffers a dilution of their voting power.
The easiest 
way to understand how prison-based gerrymandering undermines the integrity of our political process is to look at how prisons affect local elections. Most (in)famously, during the 2002 election cycle, the town of Anamosa, Iowa was divided into 4 City Council wards of about 1,370 people each. Ward 2, however, contained a state penitentiary that housed over 1,320 prisoners. Thus Ward 2's actual population was comprised of fewer than 60 non-incarcerated residents.
Anamosa's districting plan (pictured) therefore granted the approximately 60 constituents of Ward 2 the same level of political representation accorded to over 1,300 people living in each of the other wards. Remarkably, a man was elected to Anamosa's City Council from Ward 2 on the strength of two write-in votes.
The Anamosa example and others like it across the country make a mockery of the principle of "one person, one vote." Articulated by the Supreme Court in the seminal case Reynolds v. Sims, the one person, one vote principle requires that election districts be comprised of roughly the same number of constituents so that every person receives the same level of representation. As Anamosa illustrates, prison-based gerrymandering contravenes that basic principle of political equality.
Unfortunately, the Anamosa pattern has been replicated throughout the country, and at all levels of government - from school boards to city councils to statewide legislatures. It is a problem that is not limited to any particular region, and that distorts democracy for both rural and urban communities alike.
Undoubtedly, however, the communities that are the most thoroughly victimized by prison-based gerrymandering are urban communities of color-a result of the racial discrimination that infects our nation's criminal justice policies.