Correctional Facility Locator 2010

The Correctional Facility Locator identifies correctional facilities counted in the 2010 Census, so that population numbers can be manually corrected for the purposes of redistricting. (Other tools will be developed later for other purposes, including correcting the distortion done to individual communities' demographic profile.)

We urge researchers to use this tool instead of their practical knowledge of prison locations, because the Census often mixes prison and non-prison populations in the same block, and occasionally does not enumerate prisons at their actual locations.

While the results of Census 2010 remain official, the Census Bureau will eventually publish the results of its Count Question Resolution program, and when that data is available starting late in 2010, we'll include those results in this tool. (Any small uncorrected errors that we discovered are noted within this tool. However for an additional 11 blocks in Connecticut, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, and New Jersey, they are described in an external list.)

Because it is often important to distinguish between local jails (which contain mostly residents of the county, who are allowed to vote) from state and federal prisons (whose prisoners typically cannot and are generally residents of distant locations), we have started to annotate each block with the name and type of the facility counted there.

If your area of interest does not have annotations yet, we provide links to lists of federal, state and local correctional facilities, their addresses and their populations on the most recent date available. We also provide, where relevant, a link to a memo that lists all new major correctional facilities built over the last decade. Unfortunately, we will not be able to identify many of the very small facilities counted in the census as they tend to be halfway houses that we do not have a database of addresses for.

Finally, if you can provide or correct any of our annotations, please click on the edit button to submit your data to our editors, so we can then share it with other users of this database.

You do not need to be logged in to use this database. If you would like an account to do extensive editing please contact us.

For other data resources related to prison gerrymandering, see our data page.

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