Brenda Wright on the Census Bureau’s policy toward the incarcerated:
“Once, only once, and in the right place” goes the hopeful mantra of the hard-working and underappreciated Census Bureau. But the current rules for counting incarcerated persons are at odds with the last part of this goal. Next week, the census will count 1.6 million people in the wrong spot, distorting democratic representation in many states and localities.
The bureau tallies incarcerated persons as residents of the prison town rather than as residents of their home communities, where they will typically return within 34 months. This policy is as old as the census, but extraordinary growth in the prison population over the last few decades — coupled with modern uses of the data to apportion political power at all levels of government — now spells big problems for representative democracy.
