Texas Signal: “When you think of redistricting in Texas gerrymandering also inevitably comes to mind. This isn’t without cause. Since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Texas has gained notoriety for its blatant gerrymandering when drawing district lines cycle after cycle leading to long and expensive legal battles to undo some of the most egregious line manipulation. Both racial and partisan gerrymandering have been used in the past by the Texas Legislature to draw its electoral maps. But the state of Texas has also used another, lesser known, method to draw unfair maps: prison gerrymandering. Prison gerrymandering, as defined by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, is the practice by which state and local governments count incarcerated persons as residents of their facilities when electoral districts are drawn as opposed to counting them as residents of their last recorded addresses. Texas is no stranger to this practice. It is a well known fact that Texas incarcerates more people than any other state and has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country but the state has also used its prisoner population to bolster the representative power of rural communities at the expense of urban and more racially diverse communities, and this is where some of the most egregious harms of prison gerrymandering manifest.”

“Recent data from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice shows that, as of February of this year, 112,000 people were incarcerated in state prisons. About 40% of these people are from one of the state’s five largest counties. In contrast, prison facilities in the state are frequently in rural regions of the state, with a particularly high concentration of them found in East Texas. This means that during the decennial redistricting process, incarcerated individuals are counted as residents of the counties where their prison is located. Elected officials who represent jurisdictions with larger incarcerated populations have the benefit of counting those individuals as constituents despite the fact that some incarcerated individuals do not have the right to vote and those that do are from other parts of the state and are likely able and registered to vote in their home communities but not the county of their facility.”