Don't Count on the Census
When the Census Bureau comes around this April, it will be counting nearly two million people in the wrong place: in the place where they are incarcerated, not where they call home. What started as a quirk in the way we count people behind bars now serves to reinforce some of our country's ugliest racial and political dynamics. This practice, called "prison gerrymandering," happens all over the country, but some of the most dramatic examples are playing out in Wisconsin, where as a result political power gets diluted in urban black communities and concentrated in rural white communities where prisons are built.