The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

  Rep. Jose Serrano, a Democrat, worked language into a recent budget bill ordering the U.S. Census Bureau to study a new way to count such inmates: by their pre-arrest address instead of the location of their cell. If Serrano's effort were to succeed, both money and political clout would likely tilt away from rural areas, where most prisoners do their time, toward New York City, where most commit their crimes. Rep. John McHugh is a Republican who represents the state's North Country, a district that includes a number of large prisons in otherwise sparsely populated areas.
"He's concerned about anything that would have a negative impact on the economic fabric of the communities of the rural areas, but he'll wait to see what the results of that study are," McHugh spokeswoman Brynn Barnett said Thursday.
New York state currently holds 63,173 prisoners. Most of its prisons are arrayed along upstate New York, while the majority of the prisoners, 56 percent, come from New York City. The state's Department of Correctional Services does not take a position on how the census should count prisoners. Bronx county, as of October 29, was the county of offense for some 6,915 prisoners, while Manhattan was the county of offense for 12,581, according to state records. Counties of offense are not a guarantee those prisoners lived there, but they are a reasonable indicator that the convict lived either in the county or nearby. While New York's prison population has declined in recent years, the national trend is continued growth. In the United States, there were 1.4 million men and women held in state and federal prisons last year, an increase of 2.6 percent, compared with an average annual growth of 3.4 percent a year since 1995. Advocates for changing prisoner counts in the U.S. Census say that long-term trend is forcing government agencies and officials to re-examine the issue. "It's unfair to count them as residents of their penitentiary, with all the needs that exist back in their home communities where they'll eventually return," said Kirsten Levingston, director of the Criminal Justice Program at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. "I think on Capitol Hill there is a growing sensitivity to the fact that people go to prison, and when they are released they need to be able to re-integrate to society," Levingston said.

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--countinginmates120
1dec01,0,1915679.story?coll=ny-region-apnewyork