The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Since the importance of the Census Bureau's prison miscount was
discovered shortly before the 2000 Census, advocates, lawmakers and
social scientists have been urging the Census Bureau to update its
methodology and change how it counts people in prison.

The Census Bureau could have spent the middle part of this decade
investigating the optimal way to collect and process the home
addresses of incarcerated people. That planning time was instead
spent stonewalling critics and ignoring proposals focused on
incremental improvements.

The Bureau's failure to take concrete steps towards counting people
in prison correctly makes it difficult for the new administration to
insist that people in prison be counted where they actually live, not
where they are temporarily confined. But the Census Bureau doesn't
have an excuse for not implementing the interim proposals that would
greatly reduce the harm caused by the prison miscount in this Census
and make a more complete fix in the future possible.

There are three things that an Obama administration should do to help
end prison-based gerrymandering:

1. INSTRUCT THE CENSUS BUREAU TO USE DIRECT ENUMERATION NOT
ADMINISTRATIVE RECORDS WHEREVER POSSIBLE TO COUNT PEOPLE IN PRISON.

Ultimately, the Census Bureau should be counting people in prison as
residents of their home communities, but the current administration
is taking small steps in the wrong direction. Some states keep home
address information in their official prison records, but in many
cases collecting home address information is best done by using
individual Census forms to collect this information directly from
incarcerated people.

After the 2000 Census, the National Research Council deemed the
quality of the data collected from correctional facilities to be
"poor" and blamed the Bureau's higher than expected reliance on
administrative records. However, rather than expand the use of direct
enumeration on special forms in prisons, the Census Bureau is
planning to eliminate them. Relying solely on administrative records
to count people in prison will further reduce data quality and make
several important advances impossible.

Three recent National Research Council reports have urged direct
counts of people in prison. All three reports believed that direct
enumeration would be more accurate than administrative records, and
all three reports encouraged the use of a special form that asked for
an alternative address. The first two reports made this
recommendation to facilitate de-duplication where data is
accidentally processed twice; and the third did so as part of a
multi-step proposal to modernize how all populations are counted.

Collecting this alternative address information -- if only for
internal testing, tracking and quality purposes -- would be an
important step towards counting people in prison at alternative
addresses in the next Census.

2. USE THE 2010 CENSUS TO DETERMINE THE BEST WAY THAT PEOPLE IN
PRISON SHOULD BE COUNTED IN THE FUTURE.

The Census regularly conducts research during one Census in order to
improve the next. Currently, the Census Bureau is ignoring its own
experts at the National Research Council who recommended that the
Bureau conduct a major research and testing program during the 2010
Census to determine the best way to assign the correct address to
people who are incarcerated on April 1. The Bureau should be testing
how to phrase the question, what kinds of administrative data it
should accept, and how to best digitize the results. Instead, the
Bureau is planning to let this opportunity slide, which could push a
major test to 2020 and ending the prison miscount to 2030.

3. CHANGE HOW THE DATA IS PUBLISHED SO THAT PRISON POPULATIONS NEED
NOT DISTORT DEMOCRACY.

While it may be too late to change where people in prison are
counted, if action is taken quickly, an Obama administration can
change how the data is published and used. Publishing block-level
counts of prison populations at the prison addresses would make it
easier for legislatures to remove the prison populations at
districting time.

Currently, the "PL94-171" data published by the Bureau for
redistricting purposes does not identify which populations are
confined in a correctional facility, often mixing custodial and
civilian populations in a single census block. When states and
counties want to draw fair districts that do not include the prison
population, they have three choices: try and match up Department of
Corrections data; wait for publication of the Census Bureau's
"Summary File 1" data which contains a correctional count; or
just guess.

Jurisdictions covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act have it
even worse, because they can't wait for the publication of the
prison counts in Summary File 1. Further, because they must publish
race and ethnicity data for each district, they find it difficult to
reconcile the partially incompatible racial and ethnic
classifications in the two data sets.

Interest in drawing districts without prison populations is clear.
Dozens of counties around the country already do these adjustments.
They parse the data themselves, but it's labor intensive and
invites error. Nevertheless, as knowledge of the problem grows, more
counties and even states are expressing interest. The Census Bureau
is uniquely suited to provide this information, and doing so would
have only the smallest of burdens on Census Bureau operations.

Publishing an alternative version of the redistricting data that
contained just the prison population at prison addresses would only
require the publication of existing data in a different format
several months earlier than the Bureau would have done otherwise. Of
the 8 million Census blocks in Census 2000, less than 6,000 contained
a correctional facility. Producing the four race/age/ethnicity
redistricting tables for the population in correctional facilities in
these blocks would be a minimal burden with wide-ranging and
long-lasting benefits.

Conclusion

The Census Bureau has been on notice for a decade that its outdated
method of counting people in prison needs to be changed. Prison-based
gerrymandering should already be history, but instead the Bureau is
seeking to repeat and amplify the errors of the past. But if
President-elect Obama acts fast, he can lessen the harm caused by the
prison miscount and ensure that the 2010 Census is the last one to
credit 2.5 million people to the wrong place.
[URL: http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/news/2008/12/12/threeactions/ ]