Retired Judge Philip Carchman, the court-appointed 11th member of the Apportionment Commission, says mediating a compromise map is "critical if not paramount."
State officials have tweaked New Jersey’s census results for the purposes of redrawing political maps for the next decade, reallocating 16,198 prisoners out of the towns where they’re jailed back to the addresses where they used to reside.
A new state law that reallocates inmates in NJ back to their hometowns for redistricting purposes could remove more than 38,000 people from the population counts of 94 municipalities.
Cumberland County – which is home to nearly half of New Jersey’s state prison population – has nearly 6,500 prisoners included in its population, but only 259 of them are actually from the county.