[EL] Prison Policy Initiative statement on Census Bureau's announcement of 2020 residence rules

[Aleks Kajstura]

 Census Bureau will count incarcerated people in the wrong place once again
in 2020 Census, continues to distort democracy

February 7, 2018

For Immediate Release — Today, the U.S. Census Bureau announced how it will
define residence
<https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018/residence-criteria.html>
for
the 2020 Census. Ignoring overwhelming public support for a change in how
incarcerated persons are counted in the Census, the Bureau announced it is
leaving in place the inaccurate and outdated practice of counting
incarcerated persons as “residents” of the prison locations instead of
their home communities. In response to this development, the Prison Policy
Initiative released the following statement:

The Prison Policy Initiative is profoundly disappointed by the Census
Bureau proposal to again count nearly 2 million people in the wrong place
on Census day. Continuing this practice will ensure another decade of
“prison gerrymandering” that unjustly awards extra political power to the
regions that host prisons, perverting the principles of equal
representation.

Peter Wagner, Executive Director of the Prison Policy Initiative, said “The
Census Bureau blatantly ignored the overwhelming consensus urging a change
in the Census count for incarcerated persons. When the Bureau asked for
public comment on its residence rules two years ago, over 99% of the 77,863
comments regarding residence rules for incarcerated persons urged the
Bureau to count incarcerated persons at their home address, which is almost
always their legal address. By planning to once again count incarcerated
people as if they were residents of correctional facilities, the Census
Bureau has simply disregarded input from the public, redistricting experts,
and legislators.”

“The Bureau’s decision is inconsistent with the way the ‘usual residence’
rule is applied to other similarly-situated people,” explained Legal
Director Aleks Kajstura. “The Census Bureau is picking favorites based on
economic and racial privilege: if boarding school students are deemed to
live at home, then the same logic should be applied to incarcerated people.”

The Prison Policy Initiative, along with many other civil rights, voting
rights, and criminal justice advocates, have long urged the Bureau to
update its rules on incarcerated persons. As our research has demonstrated
over the last two decades <https://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/50states/>,
the Census Bureau’s practice of counting incarcerated people at the
location of the facility harms our democracy at all levels of government.

When state and local officials use the Census Bureau’s prison count data
attributing ‘residence’ to the prison location, they give extra
representation to the communities that host the prisons and dilute the
representation of everyone else. This is harmful to rural communities that
contain large prisons, because it seriously distorts redistricting at the
local level of county commissions, city councils, and school boards. It
also harms urban communities by not crediting them with the incarcerated
population whose legal residence never changed.

The critical issue is that while a prison itself seems permanent, the
people located there on any given day are not.

The Census Bureau defines “usual residence” as the place where a person
“eats and sleeps most of the time”, but fails to follow that rule when
counting incarcerated people. Treating a prison as a “usual residence”
reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of incarceration. The
critical issue is that while a prison itself seems permanent, the people
located there on any given day are not. The majority of people incarcerated
in Rhode Island, for example, spend less than 100 days in the state’s
correctional facilities. If the same people were instead spending 100 days
in their summer residence, the Bureau would count them at their regular
home address. The Census Bureau continues to carve out an unexplained
exception for incarcerated people in order to count them in the wrong place.

Counting incarcerated people at the location of the facility reduces the
accuracy of Census data about communities of color. For example, because
African-Americans and Latinos are disproportionately incarcerated, counting
incarcerated people in the wrong location is particularly bad for proper
representation of African-American and Latino communities. Today’s decision
continues to sacrifice the accuracy of the Census and harm communities of
color.

Despite this major disappointment, the advocates noted two positive
developments and pledged to redouble their efforts to help states make the
data suitable for redistricting. The Bureau is planning on publishing
correctional facility populations early — at the same time as the main
redistricting data files that they send to the states. And the Bureau is
offering to help states with the number crunching required to adjust the
redistricting data on their own even as it leaves people across the country
at the mercy of an ad hoc approach to equal representation.

The earlier data publication will make the data adjustments easier for
states that end prison gerrymandering on their own, and will be
particularly useful for states with short redistricting deadlines. This
data will give redistricting officials the Census counts of people in
correctional facilities at the location of the facility – enabling states
to subtract incarcerated people from the prison location and, in
conjunction with the state’s own home address data, reallocate them back
home for that state’s redistricting.

The Prison Policy Initiative has long argued that the Census Bureau is in
the best position to end prison gerrymandering nationwide, and the
organization hopes that, by 2030, the Bureau’s residence rules will reflect
realty. But with 2020 and redistricting just around the corner, today’s
disappointing announcement makes it all the more urgent that more states
pass legislation to end prison gerrymandering in their states.



*Links:*

   - Census Bureau 2020 Census Residence Criteria and Residence Situations
   <https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/2020/program-management/memo-series/2020-memo-2018_04-appendix.pdf>(in
   earlier decades these were called the “residence rules”)
   - Census Bureau’s memo summarizing the comments and offering their
   official response
   <https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/02/08/2018-02370/final-2020-census-residence-criteria-and-residence-situations>
   - A public archive of many of the comment letters submitted to the
   Census Bureau in 2015
   <https://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/letters/FRN2015.html> and 2016
   <https://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/letters/FRN2016.html> on ending
   prison gerrymandering.
   - The 2016 comment letter of the Prison Policy Initiative and Dēmos
   <https://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/letters/2016/PPI_Demos_2016_FRN_comment.pdf>
offering
   a comprehensive rebuttal of the Bureau’s proposed, and now final,
   determination.

-30-

https://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/news/2018/02/07/frn2018/

-- 
Aleks Kajstura
Legal Director
Prison Policy Initiative
www.prisonpolicy.org
www.prisonersofthecensus.org/
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