Don't Count on the Census
The results of the 2020 federal census will have a huge impact on the country over the next ten years - but in Wisconsin, mass incarceration of African-Americans is skewing the count. In a practice known as “prison gerrymandering”, inmates are counted in the district where they are imprisoned instead of the place they call home. This has the effect of shifting political power away from urban black communities and giving disproportionate representation to certain rural white populations.
When the Census Bureau comes around this April, it will be counting nearly two million people in the wrong place: in the place where they are incarcerated, not where they call home. What started as a quirk in the way we count people behind bars now serves to reinforce some of our country's ugliest racial and political dynamics. This practice, called "prison gerrymandering," happens all over the country, but some of the most dramatic examples are playing out in Wisconsin, where as a result political power gets diluted in urban black communities and concentrated in rural white communities where prisons are built.