RHB/6/18
Sponsored by Caleb Fields, Rohan Naik of Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences
This legislation was filed in the Correction category
Presented as part of the YIG Volunteer 2024 conference
| 1 | BE IT ENACTED BY THE TENNESSEE YMCA YOUTH LEGISLATURE |
| 2 | |
| 3 | Section 1: Terms in this act, unless the context requires otherwise, shall be defined as follows: |
| 4 | a) Redistricting: The process of the state legislator drawing electoral district boundaries, occurring |
| 5 | after each decennial census. |
| 6 | b) Gerrymandering: The political manipulation of electoral district boundaries with the intent to |
| 7 | create undue advantage for a certain party. |
| 8 | c) Prison Gerrymandering: The practice of counting prison populations as part of the local |
| 9 | population during redistricting in order to skew political representation for said district(s). |
| 10 | |
| 11 | Section 2: This act will require incarcerated people to be considered residents of their homes, and |
| 12 | not of the prison, during redistricting. They shall be considered members of the districts in which |
| 13 | their home residess for the purposes of both local and state elections. |
| 14 | |
| 15 | Section 3: This act will modify Tennessee’s preexisting gerrymandering laws in order to expand |
| 16 | the current legal requirement of prisoners being considered residents of their home during county |
| 17 | elections to all state elections. These modifications will be put in place to combat prison |
| 18 | gerrymandering practices that unfairly inflate the population and political power of districts in |
| 19 | which prisons are located. |
| 20 | |
| 21 | Section 4: Counting prisoners as residents of the areas they come from provides a more accurate |
| 22 | representation of demographic make-up of those counties as well as of the counties in which |
| 23 | prisons are located. This ensures that resources such as funding, government services, and |
| 24 | political representation are based on the actual population of a particular area, rather than |
| 25 | artificially inflating the population of areas with prisons. |
| 26 | |
| 27 | Section 5: This bill will not require any funding from the state. |
| 28 | |
| 29 | Section 6: All laws or parts of laws in conflict with this act are hereby repealed. |
| 30 | |
| 31 | Section 7: This act will go into effect January 1st, 2030 |
| 32 |