Right now, when the Census Bureau counts people for the decennial census (the official count every 10 years), they count incarcerated individuals as residents of wherever the prison or jail is located. This can artificially inflate the population of rural areas where large prisons are built, giving those areas more political representation in Congress than they deserve. The End Prison Gerrymandering Act fixes this by requiring that incarcerated people be counted as residents of their last home address before they went to prison, starting with the 2030 census and every census after that.

Why does this matter? When prisoners are counted where the prison is located instead of where they actually live, it distorts how many representatives each district gets in Congress. A rural district with a large prison gets extra representation based on people who can't vote there, while the urban areas where those prisoners actually came from lose representation. This bill ensures that congressional districts are drawn based on actual voting residents, not on where people happen to be incarcerated. The change applies to state, federal, county, and municipal prisons, as well as youth detention facilities.