# Prison Gerrymandering The transfer of political weight that follows from counting incarcerated people at the facility where they are held rather than at their last home address. It is a downstream consequence of the census residence rule, not of any districting decision: the Census Bureau's "usual residence" standard counts people where they live and sleep most of the time, and for people in group quarters that means the institution. The effect is concentrated because prisons are disproportionately sited in rural districts while the incarcerated population is drawn disproportionately from urban ones, and because incarcerated people generally cannot vote in the state that is counting them. A rural district's population — and therefore its share of legislative representation and formula-driven federal funding — is inflated by residents with no voice in it. Several states now reallocate incarcerated people to their pre-incarceration addresses for state legislative redistricting, using the census data rather than changing it. The federal count itself is unchanged: the [[2030 Census Residence Rule]] proposed in September 2026 would retain counting persons confined at correctional and detention facilities at the facility while narrowing the residence rule in other respects — a useful demonstration that residence rules are chosen rather than natural. See [[How the Census Apportions Congress]] and [[Gerrymandering]]. > [!note] Stub — fill out > This page was created as a stub during learning-module generation on 2026-09-12. Audit and expand when convenient.