Census Must Count Prisoners in Their Home Communities

The Prison Policy Initiative and State Senator Eric Schneiderman have brought together an in impressive coalition of organizations and legislators to call on the US Census Bureau to change its policy on counting prisoners---and to kick off a national advocacy campaign on the issue.

“Counting prisoners as residents of the prison districts where they do not vote or otherwise participate in those communities is simply bad policy,” said State Senator Eric Schneiderman. “Disenfranchised people become an undeserved source of political power for legislators who benefit from locking up more people for longer sentences.”

“The Census Bureau’s insistence on counting prisoners as residents of rural counties creates big problems when counties like St. Lawrence go to draw county legislative districts. Because our county districts are so small, a single prison can have a huge negative impact on equal voting power,” said letter co-author Tedra L. Cobb, vice-Chair of the St. Lawrence County Board of Legislators.

Yesterday, federal, state, and local legislators presented a letter signed by 32 elected officials from New York, Texas, and Illinois to Charles Kincannon, Director of the Census Bureau, requesting that the agency collect the home addresses of all incarcerated persons in the next national decennial census and count them at those addresses. According to these officials, counting prisoners at their pre-incarceration address is essential for compliance with the “One Person, One Vote” rulings of the Supreme Court, which require that legislative districts at every level of government contain equal numbers of residents in order to ensure fair and equal representation for all.

“The Census Bureau considers redistricting to be the second most important use of its data and it wants to hear from the elected officials who use that data.” said Prison Policy Initiative Executive Director Peter Wagner. “I call upon all supporters of democracy to ask their own elected officials to join New York State Senator Eric Schneiderman and St. Lawrence County Legislator Tedra Cobb in their appeal to the Census Bureau.”

In addition to the Prison Policy Initiative, the elected officials were joined by criminal justice and democracy advocacy groups, including the Brennan Center for Justice, DEMOS, Citizens Against Recidivism, Coalition for Parole Restoration, Seven Neighborhoods Action Partnership, JusticeWorks Community, Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions, Community Service Society, The Correctional Association of New York, Families Rally for Emancipation and Empowerment (FREE!), and the Drug Policy Alliance.

Currently, the Census Bureau includes everyone housed in federal, state, and local prisons in its count of the general population of the Census block that contains the prison. New York State law, however, defines residence as the place where one voluntarily lives. Many states, including New York, also have constitutional clauses or election law statutes that explicitly declare that incarceration does not change a residence.

Unfortunately, the current Census methodology disregards this, instead counting a significant proportion of our national population in the wrong place. According to advocates, crediting the population of prisoners to the Census block where they are temporarily and involuntarily held creates electoral inequities at all levels of government.

“Every decade, states use federal census data to update their legislative district boundaries,” continued Mr. Wagner. “The goal is to ensure that each district contains the same population, as required by the federal constitution’s “one-person, one-vote” rule. The Census Bureau counts people in prison where their bodies are located on census day, not where they come from and where they will return, on average, 34 months later. The Bureau’s current practice made sense before prison populations became large enough to distort democracy. However, more people now live in prison than our three least populous states combined, and African Americans are imprisoned at 7 times the rate of whites. Today, this Census practice undermines the rule of law,” Peter Wagner explained.

(Read the whole press release.)