2030 Census Advisory Committee flags prison gerrymandering issues for the Census Bureau
2030 Census Advisory Committee's inaugural meeting ended in recommendations that future agenda include discussions of the Census Bureau's approach to counting incarcerated people in the 2030 Census.
by Aleks Kajstura, July 29, 2024
On Friday the 2030 Census Advisory Committee held their inaugural meeting and voted to put prison gerrymandering on its agenda. (That’s actually more exciting than it sounds.) The recommendation to discuss the topic in depth was both in reaction to a public comment submitted to the Committee by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights on behalf of its prison gerrymandering working group, as well as Committee members’ own expertise identifying prison gerrymandering as an issue that needs to be addressed for the 2030 Census.
Prison gerrymandering is a problem created because the Census Bureau incorrectly counts incarcerated people as residents of their prison cells rather than their home communities. As a result, when states use Census data to draw new state or local districts, they inadvertently give residents of districts with prisons greater political clout than all other state residents. The Census Bureau has a persistent undercount of Black and Latino communities — communities that have also historically been hardest hit by mass incarceration — meaning that counting incarcerated people as if they resided at facilities far from home compounds the Bureau’s undercounts of their home communities.
The topics of discussion for the Committee’s first meeting were largely (and procedurally) limited to on hard-to-count and historically undercounted populations, but committee members Jeri Green (National Urban League’s 2020 Census Black Roundtable) and Ben Williams (National Conference of State Legislatures) requested that the committee address two issues related to prison gerrymandering at a future meeting:
- The Census Bureau’s residence criteria for incarcerated people, which is based on an outdated interpretation of the Bureau’s “residence rule”, and means that people are counted as if they were residents of a correctional facility.
- The new methods of privacy protections (“disclosure avoidance”) that make it harder for states to adjust their own redistricting data to count people at home.
The 2030 Census Advisory Committee is charged with “advis[ing] the Census Bureau in conducting an accurate decennial census.” And it is in that role that it recommended that the “a future committee meeting include a discussion on residence criteria for those who are incarcerated. … [And] that there be a future discussion regarding the impact of disclosure avoidance policies on the 2030 Census.” These issues accounted for two out of the three topics recommended for discussion by the Committee.
The 2030 Census Advisory Committee operates in an advisory capacity to the Census Bureau, and as such their focus on prison gerrymandering sends a strong message to the Census Bureau that it must consider how to count incarcerated people at home in the 2030 Census.
