Site Network: Prison Policy Initiative | Prisoners of the Census
The way the Census Bureau counts people in prison creates significant problems for democracy and for our future. It creates an inaccurate picture of community populations and dramatically distorts representation at the local and state levels.
The Bureau counts prisoners as residents of the towns where they are incarcerated, though they are barred from voting in 48 states and return to their homes after being released. The practice also defies most state constitutions and statutes, which explicitly state that incarceration does not change a residence.
The approach to counting prisoners is a method that dates back to the beginning of the census, when it was important only to count the number of people in each state to ensure equal representation in Congress. Counting where people were in each state was not a priority, since it did not affect apportionment, and there were comparatively few people in prison. Today, the Supreme Court requires that legislative districts be redrawn each decade to ensure that they include equal numbers of people, thereby upholding the democratic promise of "one person, one vote." State and local legislators use census figures to redraw their districts.
“This bogus inflation gives prison districts undeserved strength in the state legislature and more influence than they would otherwise have in state affairs.”
Phantom Constituents in the Census, New York Times editorial, Sept. 26, 2005
But there are now more than 2 million people incarcerated in the United States, and the Census has not counted them accurately. The Census Bureau's outdated methods have resulted in states drawing legislative districts that count tens of thousands of residents in the wrong part of the state. This artificially inflates the population of prison towns and deflates the populations of the urban areas from which most prisoners come. Sixty percent of Illinois' prisoners are from Cook County (Chicago), yet 99% of the state's prison cells are outside the county. When this data is used to draw legislative districts, the impact is startling: many prison districts have a significant percentage of their "residents" behind bars. Our first report, Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York, found seven state senate districts would not meet minimum population requirements without counting prisoners.
Though we began our study of the problem by concentrating on New York and seven other states, the census counting method interferes with equal representation in virtually every state. In Texas, for example, one rural district's population is almost 12% prisoners. Eighty-eight residents from that district, then, are represented in the State House as if they were 100 residents from urban Houston or Dallas. Our analyses of the Census' damage to states' legislative redistricting can be found here.
The census' prison count creates an even larger problem for democracy within rural areas. Like states, most counties and many towns have legislatures where residents are proportionally represented. But because districts are usually small, their local legislatures, such as county boards, tend to be small as well. In those situations, placement of a single prison can have a significant impact.
In our research, we discovered a number of districts where the majority of the population are prisoners from other parts of the state. Rural residents who live in the same community as a prison, but not in its district, have their voting power severely diluted. In Franklin County, New York, almost 11% of the population reported in the Census is incarcerated prisoners from elsewhere in the state. Drawing a district that included the prisons in the town of Malone would have resulted in a district that was two-thirds prisoners. Such a district would give the few actual residents three times the political power of residents elsewhere in the county. The chair of the county legislature called ignoring the prisoners during redistricting a "no-brainer."
To date, roughly 100 communities have discovered the problem with their representation and successfully lobbied their legislatures to draw districts that exclude the prison populations. Our local impact page has analyses of democratic distortion on the local level, and examples of communities that have lobbied for fair representation.
After redistricting, the next most important use of Census Bureau data is for planning purposes. Here, too, the census data creates a grossly inaccurate picture.
Recent research has shown that correctional facilities are increasingly located in areas that are geographically and demographically far removed from the communities to which most incarcerated people belong. According to Department of Agriculture Demographer Calvin Beale, although most prisoners are from urban areas, 60% of new prison construction takes place in non-metro regions.
Counting large populations of prisoners as local residents leads to misleading conclusions about the size and growth of communities. Some counties' reported population growth is due to the importation of prisoners to a new correctional institution. In the 1990s, an astonishing 30% of "new residents" of upstate New York were people being sent to prison. If not for the construction of new prison cells, 56 counties the Census Bureau identified as "growing" during the 1990s would have in fact reported declining populations.
The inaccurate data also significantly skews the demographic makeup of prison communities. More than 12% of African-American men in their late twenties, for example, are currently incarcerated, but the rural areas where most prisons are located tend to be overwhelmingly white.
Our statistics page contains analyses of the Census data's impact on statistics used for research and planning.