Prison Gerrymandering Alive and Well in Oklahoma
As states across the country push to end “prison gerrymandering”—the U.S. Census practice of counting prisoners in the typically rural and white areas where they are held, thereby diluting the voting power of the urban and non-white areas that they come from—the non-profit Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) released a report on April 29, 2025, detailing the pernicious effects of the practice in Oklahoma.
The state’s District 56, for example, is home to El Reno Federal Correctional Institution and camp, operated by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), as well as Great Plains Correctional Facility (GPCF), which is operated for the state Department of Corrections (DOC) under contract with GEO Group, Inc. Those lockups hold 14% of the total population counted for Caddo, Canadian and Grady Counties. Meaning that every 86 non-incarcerated citizens there has as much political representation as 100 citizens in any other county. In fact, the effect is likely greater, PPI noted, because many BOP prisoners are not from Oklahoma at all.
At the time of the last census in 2020, GEO operated GPCF for the BOP, which then pulled its contract. That shrank the area’s population before the lockup was reopened and filled with DOC prisoners. This “yo-yo-ing of the population in and out of the facility,” PPI noted, will only continue as the DOC “is starting to sour on [the new] plan as well, likely leading to another arbitrary population change.”
About 14% of Oklahoma’s total population is Black or Native American. But in the state DOC, the share balloons to 36%. Counting all those non-white prisoners where they are clustered in prison rather than where they come from—and will one day return—serves to undermine the voting power of those communities in two ways. First, the number of seats they are awarded in the legislature is artificially inflated. Second, the ability of prisoners to vote on who fills those seats is severely limited by felon voting bans and the logistical difficulties of obtaining a ballot behind bars—leaving the local non-incarcerated population with an outsized political influence.
Source: Prison Policy Initiative
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