On April 12, Maryland became the first state in the country to
count incarcerated people as residents of their hometowns,
rather than as residents of the place where they are imprisoned,
for the purposes of legislative districting. The passage of the
No Representation Without Population Act ends prison-based
gerrymandering, which falsely inflates the political power of
districts with prisons, due to the U.S. Census’s practice of
counting incarcerated populations as residents of the prison.
Incarcerated populations have the potential to skew
representation significantly because prisons tend to be located
in sparsely populated rural areas. For example, in one Western
Maryland legislative district, 18 percent of the population is
comprised of prisoners. This means that every group of four
residents in this district has as much political influence as
five residents anywhere else in the state. It is important to
note that the new redistricting does not affect the distribution
of any funding based on census data, n