Should the census count inmates as residents of the prisons where they’re held — often hundreds of miles from home? Or should they be tallied as citizens of the cities or counties they came from?
An agreement just reached between the U.S. Census Bureau and Rep. William Clay Jr., D-Mo., the chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees census issues, may signal a historic shift in how the bureau reports prisoners to state and local governments. The accord creates at least a chance for prisoners’ overwhelmingly urban home areas to get a better break on legislative representation.
Counting prisoners where they’re incarcerated didn’t matter a lot when America had modest numbers of inmates, usually held in institutions near their homes. But all this has changed as America’s prisoner counts have soared from about 500,000 in 1980 to 2.3 million today. The combination of tough “law-and-order” politics and the development of a vast “prison industrial complex” has led to confinement of predominantly city-based convicts in hundreds of new prisons in small town areas.
Since the 1970s with their economies and populations declining, rural interests have campaigned hard for the prisons as a source of jobs for residents. State legislators representing those areas back up the towns’ efforts and are likely to support indiscriminate “lock-’em-up”strategies.
But far-from-home incarceration is bad penology. Inmates who are held at outstate (sometimes even out-of-state) locations receive fewer family visits. More isolated, they’re destined to have a harder time readjusting upon release. The practice feeds a negative spiral leading to more recidivism and demands for still more prisons.
But there’s another impact: Because the census historically counts inmates where they’re imprisoned, their numbers actually swell population counts — and legislative representation — for rural areas. The losers in political clout are then the very urban areas most of the prisoners come from.
The Prison Policy Initiative, an advocacy group that documents the impacts of mass incarceration, found 21 counties across the nation where at least 20 percent of the population were prisoners from other counties.
The distortion makes it less likely that a whole range of smart penal reform measures — electronic monitoring in place of imprisonment, community-based re-entry programs and halfway houses, basic education and post-release employment programs — will receive adequate state funding.
The agreement Rep. Clay has negotiated with the Census Bureau doesn’t reach the full solution that reformers would like — to count all inmates as residents of their home cities and counties, not their prison addresses. But the bureau has agreed to make an early release, in 2011, of its counts of “group quarters” such as prisons. States then will have time to decide how, for purposes of the legislative reapportionment they’ll be starting next year, their prisoners should be counted: where the prisons are, or where the prisoners last resided before incarceration. Or they can choose not to count them for reapportionment purposes at all.
How the issue plays out over the long run will influence not just state politics but big decisions in federal grant policies too. The reality is that prisons aren’t the only issue shortchanging urban areas. As the National Research Council confirmed in a 2009 study, there’s a long history of “differential net undercount” of blacks and Hispanics that “has led to their receiving less than their share of federal funds and political representation.”
Correcting the imbalance, compounded by many low-income residents’ fears of government and/or immigration laws, is no easy task for census takers. But there should be no easier place to start than counting prisoners at their home addresses, not their prison cells.
