“It is no secret that the Census Bureau counts incarcerated people in the wrong place — a prison or jail cell — instead of in their actual communities,” writes Aleks Kajstura in a new analysis for the Prison Policy Initiative. Because of this, during redistricting, when states and local governments use census data to draw new political boundaries, residents of districts with correctional facilities gain greater political clout. It’s a problem known as prison gerrymandering.
The Prison Policy Initiative has worked for two decades to change this. But its researchers have also recently found a problem that exacerbates prison gerrymandering. Through examinations of 2020 Census data, they found that the Bureau also routinely mistakenly and unknowingly places prisons and jails in the wrong location in its data or dramatically miscounts them.
“It is not a rare mistake,” they concluded. “It is perpetuated across the country and across the decades.”
The solution seems simple: count incarcerated people as residents of the homes they came from. Or as Kajstura puts it: “If the Census Bureau truly values accuracy, it should count incarcerated people at home.”
The Bureau has defended its practice by saying that it’s using its “usual residence rule” – counting them where they live and sleep most of the time. Prison Policy Initiative analysts contend that “this is simply not true,” because short prison stays are common and incarcerated people often are moved between multiple facilities. Even during that shuffling, however, their pre-incarceration home remains the only stable address.
But beyond the usual-residence rule issues, those at the Prison Policy Initiative found that, during the 2020 count, the Census Bureau counted at least one prison or jail in every state in the wrong place.
Here are just a few examples from a single state -- New York state:
The Census Bureau didn’t count any people at Adirondack Correction Facility in New York — a place that holds about 300 incarcerated people. However, roughly the same number of incarcerated people were counted in a state forest about 175 miles away.”
Also, Woodbourne Correctional Facility, also in New York, appears to have been counted twice — once in its actual location and again in the empty field next door.
And in Wyoming County, N.Y., rather than counting them in the facility where they were confined, the Bureau counted nearly a thousand incarcerated people in a field. Another group of over 800 was reported just across the street from their facility’s location — also in empty fields. In the 2000 Census, the Bureau reported nearly 1,800 incarcerated people — likely from the Wyoming Correctional facility in a random field halfway across the county.
Prison Policy Initiative researchers found similar miscounts and misallocations in every state, the analysis notes.
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