There are only 934 households in Mt Sterling, per the same census data.
This is a garbage post for comparing the demographics of a tiny town against those of a state prison _populated from all over western Illinois_ that happens to be located near this town.
I won’t argue that the demographics of that prison don’t seriously suck, though. But even that needs to be studied with nuance. Unless you can guarantee that prisoners are uniformly distributed to prisons statewide, then it could just be that black people are disproportionately sent to _this_ prison (for any reason).
In some (most?) states, currently-incarcerated prisoners cannot vote, but they do count towards the population of the town in which they are incarcerated for things like Congressional districting.
So, this has the effect of massively skewing political power towards the demographics of the non-incarcerated people living near prisons, at the expense of the districts where the incarcerated people actually came from.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 15.8 ms ] threadThis is a garbage post for comparing the demographics of a tiny town against those of a state prison _populated from all over western Illinois_ that happens to be located near this town.
I won’t argue that the demographics of that prison don’t seriously suck, though. But even that needs to be studied with nuance. Unless you can guarantee that prisoners are uniformly distributed to prisons statewide, then it could just be that black people are disproportionately sent to _this_ prison (for any reason).
In some (most?) states, currently-incarcerated prisoners cannot vote, but they do count towards the population of the town in which they are incarcerated for things like Congressional districting.
So, this has the effect of massively skewing political power towards the demographics of the non-incarcerated people living near prisons, at the expense of the districts where the incarcerated people actually came from.