# Understanding the End Prison Gerrymandering Act

Right now, when the government counts people for the census every ten years, it counts prisoners as living in the town where the prison is located—not where they actually lived before going to prison. This creates a real problem: it artificially inflates the population of prison towns and deflates the population of the communities where prisoners actually came from. Since prisons are often built in rural areas far from cities, this means urban communities lose political representation while rural prison towns gain it, even though the prisoners themselves can't vote and didn't choose to live there.

This bill fixes that by changing how prisoners are counted in the census starting in 2030. Instead of counting someone as a resident of the prison town, the census will count them as living in their last home address before they were incarcerated. So if someone from Chicago goes to prison in a small downstate town, they'll be counted as a Chicago resident, not as part of the prison town's population. This matters because census numbers determine how many representatives each area gets in Congress and how political districts are drawn.

The practical effect is that it redistributes political power more fairly. Communities that lose residents to the prison system will get their population numbers back, which means they'll keep the congressional representation they deserve. Prison towns won't get an artificial boost in power from counting people who don't actually live there by choice. It's a way of saying that being incarcerated shouldn't change where you're counted as living for purposes of political representation, especially since prisoners can't vote anyway.

End Prison Gerrymandering Act

End Prison Gerrymandering Act This bill requires the Department of Commerce, beginning with the 2030 decennial census, to attribute an individual incarcerated in a correctional center to the individual's last place of residence before incarceration. Further, a state must treat such an individual's last place of residence in the state before incarceration as the individual's place of residence for purposes of congressional redistricting.