Craig Powell, Executive Coordinator
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http://www.powernetoftampa.org/
“It Takes Teamwork To Make A Dream Work”
Mass incarceration isn’t just a problem in urban areas
PRISON POLICY INITIATIVE UPDATESfor January 25, 2023Exposing how mass incarceration harms communities and our national welfare
Where people in prison come from: The geography of mass incarceration (https://news.prisonpolicy.org/t/r-l-tjhhihly-bdkdtkyoh-p/)
by Emily Widra
One of the most important criminal legal system disparities in the United States has long been difficult to decipher: Which communities and neighborhoods throughout the state do incarcerated people come from? Anyone who lives in or works within heavily policed and incarcerated communities intuitively knows that certain neighborhoods disproportionately experience incarceration. But data have rarely been available to quantify how many people from each community are imprisoned with any real precision.
But now, thanks to redistricting reforms that ensure incarcerated people are counted correctly in the legislative districts they come from, we can understand the geography of incarceration in twelve states with up-to-date data. These twelve states — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington — are among the states (https://news.prisonpolicy.org/t/r-l-tjhhihly-bdkdtkyoh-x/) that have ended prison gerrymandering (https://news.prisonpolicy.org/t/r-l-tjhhihly-bdkdtkyoh-m/), and now count incarcerated people where they legally reside — at their home address — rather than in remote prison cells. This type of reform, as we often discuss, is crucial for ending the siphoning of political power from disproportionately Black and Latino communities to pad out the mostly rural, predominantly white regions where prisons are located. And when reforms like these are implemented, they bring along a convenient side effect: In order to correctly represent each community’s population counts, states must collect detailed state-wide data on where imprisoned people call home, which is otherwise impossible to access.
