Not long ago, New York Times editorialist Anthony Thompson asked an interesting question: “When do communities want prisoners in their backyard?”
The answer: when it’s census-taking time.
The reason for this sudden reversal of the commonplace NIMBY (not in my backyard) position has to do with money—a lot of it. Once the counting is done, population figures compiled by the census will determine the distribution of at least $300 billion in federal funding to state and local governments. And it has some legislators doing a money—and power—grab.
Counting inmates, who incidentally can’t vote, as residents in order to pad state legislative districts is an unsavory practice that exaggerates the political power of the largely rural districts where prisons are built and diminishes the power of the mainly urban districts where inmates come from and where they inevitably return.
It’s called prison-based gerrymandering. Voting districts are supposed to contain the same number of people, but basing districts on non-voting, non-resident prison populations gives a handful of residents the same political power as thousands of residents elsewhere in the city. And although the problem is also a national one—the U.S. Census currently counts incarcerated people as residents of the prison location—it more commonly distorts state districts.
For instance, prisoners account for 7 percent of one state assembly district in New York, 12 percent of a state house district in Texas is made up of prisoners, and 15 percent of one Montana state house district consists of prisoners imported from other parts of the state.
Such manipulation wasn’t a serious problem when the prison population was smaller. But the 2010 Census will report five times as many people in prison as it did just three decades ago. With nearly two million people behind bars in America, it’s time the Census Bureau ensured a fair count.
Undermining Public Safety
The population figures we’re talking about are considerable. For instance, one out of every three people who moved to upstate New York in the last decade actually “moved” into newly constructed prisons. Every year around 700,000 individuals incarcerated across the country leave prison and return to their home communities and neighborhoods. More than half of these men and women will return to prison within three years.
At Prison Fellowship, we understand that if inmates hope to turn their lives around and become law-abiding and productive citizens, they will need rehabilitation programs that start behind bars and remain available to them in their communities after release. Such programs are necessary for successful reentry, and without them, many ex-offenders are likely to return to the criminal activities that landed them in prison in the first place.
By claiming prisoners as constituents, lawmakers in these over-rated districts deprive prisoners of the chance to receive job training, substance-abuse treatment, family counseling, and dozens of other services in the areas where they live. Snatching the funds necessary to support these programs basically guarantees that many ex-offenders will fail to connect on the outside and eventually commit new crimes and return to prison.
One person, One vote
Determining census figures should never be solely about politics. Using the incarcerated for monetary gain and political power is fundamentally unfair, even un-American. When states use census counts to draw legislative districts, they enhance the weight of a vote cast in districts that contain prisons at the expense of all other districts in the state. In addition, as prisoners are unlikely to receive representation equal to the district’s other constituents, counting them as residents of the prison distorts the democratic principle of one person, one vote.
At this point, only two states—Delaware and Maryland—have passed legislation to correct the problem and adjust census data to count incarcerated individuals at their home address, rather than their prison address. Similar legislation is pending in New York. While it is too late for changes to be made for the 2010 census, the Census Bureau recently announced it would accelerate the release of its prison count data so that states can more readily identify prison populations in the census. This federal change will be helpful to states that wish to make their own adjustments.
Using census numbers to rob the neighborhoods that prisoners call home and—more importantly—to which they will return does not add up to less crime and safer communities. As lawmakers in various states consider redrawing the boundaries of congressional and state legislative districts, they need to keep that in mind.