The US incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. It has 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s inmates. Its correctional population–those in jail, prison on probation or parole–totalled 7.3 million, or 1 in every 31 adults. At the start of 2008, 2319, 258 adults were held in American prisons or jails, or one in every 99.1 adults. 
There is a geography to incarceration. The prison population in Wisconsin grew from 4,000 in 1980 to 23, 431 in 2006. Residents of Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha and Rock Counties are much more likely to be incarcerated than residents of others counties. African Americans are also disproportionally affected by this balloning prison population. Wisconsin in fact has the second highest Black incarceration rate in the country, with Blacks 10.6 times as likely to be in prison as whites. According to the PEW institute,
‘prison growth and higher incarceration rates do not reflect a parallel increase in crim, or a corresponding surge in the nation’s population. Instead more people are behind bars principally because of a wave of policy choices that are sending more lawbreakers to prison and, through popular ‘three-strikes’ measures and other sentancing laws, imposing longer prison stays on inmates.’ Read the PEW report on the geographies of US incarercation. 
The prison population is counted in the US census. Counting prisoners in the US census but not on the ballot box can have severe effects. While this may not have posed as big of a problem in years past, when incarceration rates were much, much lower, its having huge ramifications today, in everything from how state funding is allocated, to how electoral boundaries are drawn.
Peter Wagner of the Prison Policy Initative compiles research on the effects of the prison population on electoral redistricting. He recommended the follwing articles to get a better sense of the political stakes in Wisconsin with regard to prisons, census data and the population geographies of electoral politics:
Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in Wisconsin
A report from the PPI that “finds rural county and city government districts [in Wisconsin] that are as much as 79% prisoners. “This allows the real residents of a district with a prison to unfairly dominate their local government.”
Fuzzy Math: Is the Census Bureau creating unfair politics in Wisconsin?
Milwaukee Magazine article noting the effects on electoral politics in Wisconsin, a state where “the number of state prisoners grew from 4,000 in 1980 to over 20,000 in 2000. The growing number of miscounted citizens, the Prison Policy Institute says, causes “serious damage … to state and local democracy.”
New prisons mean new challenge for democracy in rural county
An article about Chippewa County’s coming crisis from the prison miscount. Wagner writes: ”One of the new prisons in Chippewa County is large enough to create a bigger vote dilution problem than in any other county we’ve studied in Wisconsin. If the districts were redrawn today, the district that included the Stanley Correctional Institution would be 72% prisoners. Every group of 28 residents near the prison would be given as much as say over the future of the county as 100 residents in every other district. Giving a small group of people 3 times as much political power as other residents because they happen to have a prison nearby isn’t just unfair; it violates state and federal law.”
The New York Times also ran a story of how the prison population affected the results of a municipal election in Anamosa, Iowa. Danny Young was elected as a representative to city council on a total of 2 votes:
“That is because his ward includes 1,300 inmates housed in Iowa’s largest penitentiary — none of whom can vote. Only 58 of the people who live in Ward 2 are nonprisoner”. Read the full story
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