In the first lawsuit of its kind, the NAACP and Yale Law School are suing the State of Connecticut for the use of prison gerrymandering.
Prison gerrymandering is when inmates are counted in the voting district where they’re incarcerated, instead of their hometowns.
“We simply cannot accept that the State of Connecticut ships inmates to the rural areas far from their homes, then uses the fiction of their supposed residence in those areas to dilute the electoral power of their home communities," said Brad Berry, general counsel of the NAACP.
Berry says the practice violates the “one person, one vote” principle of the 14th Amendment.
In Connecticut, 85 percent of state inmates are people of color from cities like Hartford and New Haven. They’re imprisoned in rural, mostly white, communities in the northern part of the state.