Legal News

Change is Predicted in Census Prisoner Count

By Brian Harris

By Amaris Elliott-Engel
Of the Legal Staff

The 2010 census will be the last to count inmates at their place of incarceration instead of their home communities, an advocate for changing where the U.S. census counts the incarcerated predicted at the National Conference of State Legislatures Tuesday.

But while it is likely too late in the current U.S. Census process to change where prisoners are counted, every state can prevent "prison-based gerrymandering" by omitting prisoners for purposes of legislative districting at the state level, said Peter Wagner of Prison Policy Initiative, an advocacy group based in Northampton, Mass.

Wagner said as long as state officials start now there is enough time for states to take out prisoners from the population data used by elected officials in drawing up legislative districts.

The Legal covered a report PPI released in June that concluded the voting power of Philadelphians is diluted on the state level because non-voting state and federal prisoners are counted by the U.S. Census Bureau where they are incarcerated, instead of the prisoners' home communities in which they lived before they were incarcerated. Because prisoners can't vote, residents who have a right to vote in districts that have a prison within their borders benefit from greater legislative clout than residents who don't live in districts with prisons, the report argued.

Eight state House of Representatives districts would not meet federal "one-person, one-vote" standards if nonvoting state prisoners did not count as district residents for purposes of drawing up legislative districts, according to the PPI report.

The census issue, ostensibly arcane, has been gaining attention in states across the country. There are 100 counties in the United States that have excluded prisoners when drawing up their local county legislative districts, Wagner said.

Cathy McCully, chief of the census redistricting data office of the U.S. Census Bureau, said that in a 2006 census study of removing prisoners from census data, state officials told them that they would rather not have a federal mandate about where prisoners are counted and would prefer to let each individual state handle the issue on the state level. "We never dictate how the data is used in a districting cycle," McCully said.

Melissa Calderwood, a principal analyst for Kansas' legislative research department and on the same panel with Wagner, discussed how Kansas takes U.S. Census data and omits non-resident military and college students by hand for purposes of preparing a data file for legislative districting. Kansas' constitution requires that nonresident students and members of the military be omitted from counting as residents of a legislative district in which they temporarily reside.

State legislators from Vermont to Wisconsin to Texas all spoke during the conference session in support of adjusting where prisoners are counted.

Full post as published by The Legal Intelligencer Blog on July 22, 2009 (boomark / email).