The Prison Gerrymandering Project (Research Paper Sample)

The Prison Gerrymandering Project Name Institutional Details Course Details Professor Date The Prison Gerrymandering Project Prison gerrymandering, which involves counting incarcerated individuals as residents of the districts where they are held rather than their original addresses, poses grave problems in terms of democratic representation and equity. It occurs when the disproportionately high-security prisons in rural areas assume political power at the expense of prisoners' concentrations in urban and more racially diverse communities. According to Fisher, King, & Limon (2021), the importance of fixing this problem is huge because it can affect democracy and the fair allocation of political representation in many ways. They recommend various changes so that incarcerated individuals' residents are recorded accurately through a method that corresponds to their home communities, thus making the democratic process more impartial and representative. Prison gerrymandering can be traced back to the census practice of reporting the incarcerated people in the places of their confinement instead of the addresses where they come from. This practice distorts political representation by inflating districts' populations with prisons, thus affecting redistricting and political power. The legislative actions against prison gerrymandering have succeeded in at least a dozen states, such as Maryland and New York, for the 2011 redistricting cycle and in others like California, Colorado, and New Jersey in 2020 (Prison Policy Initiative, 2011). Such laws have been passed in these states so that incarcerated people can be accounted for at their home addresses for redistricting purposes, trying to achieve more just representation. Census Bureau's early prison count data release in the 2010 and 2020 Census cycles has motivated these adjustments. Notwithstanding the strides, this persistent practice affords certain categories of representatives while revealing the imbalance of political representation. Political representation is distorted by prison gerrymandering much unequally, and the representation of urban areas and communities of colour is greatly underestimated. In contrast, the representation is inflated in the rural area where prisons are located. Wang (2021) notes that this practice shifts political power and resources from communities that a person ordinarily calls home to those near the prison facility. The disparity in funding and political consideration is moving towards areas with higher population density. The population of incarcerated can not be elected in a local election even though they are counted. The ramifications are also not confined to misshaped political maps, as they affect resource distribution and community representation in a quite large measure. Recent legal problems and policy amendments are geared at rectifying the counting of imprisoned people for redistricting intentions. Fisher, King, & Limon (2021) talked about the concerns associated with these changes, stressing that individuals should be counted according to the address they live in to avoid the concept of false representation. The Prison Policy Initiative (2011) has called attention to the great strides in some States that have adopted laws where inmates in prisons are counted as home for redistricting purposes, thus correcting political representation distortion due to prison gerrymandering. These efforts aim to update the socio-spatial inequalities that ma...