Census Count of Urban Prisoners

[F.O.T.W.C.]

In 48 states prisoners cannot vote, but the Census counts the nation's mostly urban prisoners as residents of the mostly rural towns that host prisons. As a result, economic and political resources shift away from urban areas to rural prison towns. Most significantly, every decade states use these "phantom" populations to redraw state legislative boundaries and re-apportion political representatives and power accordingly. With U.S. incarceration now setting worldwide records, and the consequences of that falling disproportionately on people of color, the harm to our democracy and civil rights is measurable and profound.
The political actors that gain power at the redistricting table are the same political actors who are most likely to support prison expansion, mandatory prison sentences, and no-parole policies. As this occurs, urban and minority communities who are in most need of rational, democratically-developed crime policy find their votes, voices, and the power of their political representatives diluted. Thus, while the legislative intent has been to disenfrachise individual prisoners during their incarceration, the result is the effective disenfranchisement of whole communities not under criminal justice control.

This problem of shifting political power occurs because the Census counts prisoners where they are incarcerated for its own convenience and because the practice does not impact the Census' only mandate: to count for purposes of congressional reapportionment between the states. However, if the effective disenfranchisement of communities can be documented, and a constituency built for change, this problem can be reversed. No state is required to blindly use Census data, and many states have a history of correcting what they view as Census mistakes. Thus, in the absence of Congress requiring the Census to change its methodology, individual states can use their own population counting methods.

If we want our legislators to fairly and democratically address pressing issues like urban crime, rural unemployment, the budgetary crisis, and drug addiction, legislative districts should be drawn on the basis of actual population. Counting prisoners at their homes and not in their cells is the only way to ensure that issues of crime policy and rural unemployment are resolved fairly and by the communities actually affected.

In short, current Census practices allows white rural prison communities to appropriate urban minority residents for the purpose of representation. This runs counter to any idea of equal protection under the law, and harkens back to the repugnant three-fifth's clause that gave the South extra representation for their slaves. We need not go back in time. We must instead document the racism inherent in these practices, publicize them, and build a movement for change.