Inquirer: An end to sinister prison gerrymandering is a racial justice victory | Opinion

…The Legislative Reapportionment Commission voted 3-2 to count incarcerated people in their home districts, rather than where they are incarcerated, ending the practice of prison gerrymandering here in the commonwealth.

A real awakening is happening about how mass incarceration has devastated Black and brown communities and disenfranchised millions of people from the ballot box and representation…

Prison gerrymandering — the act of counting people for purposes of redistricting at the location of the prison instead of their home — is especially sinister. Not only are map makers silencing individual voices in government, they are in effect stealing representation from areas that are dramatically underserved while allocating that political power to whiter, more rural places that incarcerated people often have no connection to.

…Since people in prison for felony convictions cannot vote, you might think they do not have an impact at all. However, the opposite is true. When a voting district includes a prison population, the district typically contains fewer voters and so fewer votes are needed to elect its officials.

That means communities where prisons are built, which are predominantly white and rural, get an outsized say in Congress and in state legislatures at the expense of metropolitan areas and nonwhite communities….

Read the full commentary in the Philadelphia Inquirer here.