Last month, the U.S. Census Bureau released its proposal on how to implement residence guidelines for the 2020 Census. Tucked away in the guidelines is a plan to continue the inaccurate and outdated practice of "prison-based gerrymandering."
Prison-based gerrymandering is when state and local governments count incarcerated people as residents of the district where they are being held -- artificially inflating the population of the districts where prisons and jails are located and giving said districts undue political influence.
Counting incarcerated people as if they were "residents" of the correctional facility makes the Census less accurate for everyone: rural and urban communities; incarcerated persons and their families; governmental authorities trying to draw accurate redistricting plans; researchers trying to understand the demographics of local communities.
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Representative democracy is rooted in the idea that equal numbers of people should have equal influence over the legislative process. The Census is used as a tool to reshape the legislative districts to maintain equal populations in each district. Prison-based gerrymandering distorts this process.
It gets worse. Because our criminal "justice" policies are steeped in racial discrimination, the communities that are the most victimized by this practice are urban, Black and Latino -- weakening their voting strength and transferring political power from urban communities of color to predominantly white rural areas.
As explained by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund,
African-Americans are 12.7% of the general population, but are 41.3% of the federal and state prison population. Members of the disproportionately minority incarcerated population are largely held in areas that are both geographically and demographically far removed from their home communities: in New York, for example, approximately 77% of all prisoners are African-American or Latino, but 98% of all prisons are located in disproportionately white State Senate districts. Nationally, rural communities make up only about 20% of the U.S. population, but it is estimated that 40% of all incarcerated persons are held in facilities located in rural areas.
(emphasis mine)
The Census Bureau defines "usual residence" as the place where a person "eats and sleeps most of the time," but fails to follow that rule when counting incarcerated people. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, "The majority of people incarcerated in Rhode Island, for example, spend less than 100 days in the state's correctional facilities. If the same people were instead spending 100 days in their summer residence, the Bureau would count them at their regular home address."
The unexplained exception for incarcerated people makes less sense once you take into consideration that other populations -- such as deployed overseas military, and juveniles staying in residential treatment centers -- are counted in their home location even if they are sleeping elsewhere on Census Day.
A common misconception about changing prison-based gerrymandering is that once the incarcerated persons are counted at their permanent residence (as opposed to their temporary prison residence), the district where the prison is would receive less state and federal resources. That is a misunderstanding of how population based aid is structured.
As explained by the Prison Policy Initiative:
Much of the so-called “population-based” aid is not distributed directly to local areas, and most government aid formulas are too sophisticated to be fooled by where people in prison are counted. Medicaid reimbursements and federal highway funds are block grants to states, so it doesn’t matter where in a state a prisoner is counted as long as he is counted in the correct state. Federal poverty programs are based in part of Census calculations of poverty, which by definition exclude prison and other group quarters populations. The federal program that subsidizes school lunch programs is even more sophisticated, looking only at the number of children in poverty.
If anything, prison-based gerrymandering can cost rural communities money. According to Calhoun County, GA Commission Chairman Mike Stuart, the county has to pay its officials more because the prison population makes the county look more populous. The prison population in Calhoun County pushes the county into the next pay bracket, costing the county thousands a year in required payments to the Probate Judge, County Superior Court Clerk and other officials. In short, Calhoun County is not getting rich from the Census Bureau’s prison count. What's more is that they've taken steps to correct the political effects of the Census Bureau’s prison miscount.
California, Delaware, Maryland and New York have already adopted their own legislation to count incarcerated persons in the right location -- and hundreds of municipalities have acted against prison-based gerrymandering. Jefferson County, FL and Cranston, RI have seen successful Equal Protection challenges to prison gerrymandering in federal district courts. By not ending this practice, the Census Bureau has regulated that people across the country will continue to be at the mercy of an ad hoc approach to equal representation.
The rules for the 2020 Census have not yet been set. The Census Bureau will accept comments on their proposed guidelines through September 1, 2016 before moving forward.
Now is the time to take action against this inaccurate and outdated practice.
Bonus: The good folks over at the Prison Policy Initiative are featured in a short (2:21) explainer video made prior to the 2010 Census. Take a look:
Huge thanks to Peter Wagner and the Prison Policy Initiative for leading the charge to end prison-based gerrymandering and for contributions to this post. Click here to support their work.