Prison kind of gives you that feeling like you're out of

the nip on yourself. You don't feel like a resident of anything.

You just feel like you locked up and wherever they want to send you, they send you, wherever they want you to be.

You be. So it's not a home.

Some of the most powerless people in the US are prisoners.

But prisoners are used to shift how political power is distributed.

And that's what we're going to be talking about on this episode of NPR's Code Switch, Census Watch 2020.

I'm Shireen Marisol Maraji.

The character Augustus Hill from the HBO Prison Drama Oz breaks this down way better than I ever will.

Here he is explaining how prisoners, the census, and political power are all connected.

He says the census counts prisoners as residents of the town they're incarcerated in.

Not where they lived before they got convicted. So what you say?

The state uses these numbers to determine election districts.

A senator from a white rural area with a prison can count the inmates as his constituents.

Those inmates who are largely of color aren't allowed to vote.

Senator has no allegiance to them at all. The census is senseless.

So people who agree with that last statement that the census is senseless when it comes to the way prison

population is used to decide certain voting districts call this prison gerrymandering.

And one way of doing this is to use the prison count to fill up a voting district with non-voters.

This can result in local elected officials representing constituents who can't hold them accountable.

And in a lot of cases what this looks like is a white elected official representing

disproportionately black and Latinx prisoners who cannot vote.

...