Prison expansion made 56 counties with declining populations appear to be growing in Census 2000

by Peter Wagner, April 26, 2004 Link

Counting incarcerated people as if they were residents of the prison town leads to misleading portrayals of which counties are growing and which are declining. Declining populations in a county are often a sign of economic distress. Census 2000 reported that 78% of counties experienced population growth during the 1990s. Yet 56 of these counties can attribute their growth only to prison expansion and not to children being born or new residents choosing to move to the county. Said another way, for each 50 counties labeled by the Census as growing during the 1990s, one of those counties actually saw a decline in their actual free population. (See map and table.)

Most of these counties with disguised declining populations have significant incarcerated populations. More than half have at least 1,000 people behind bars. Six of these counties were also featured in last week’s column Twenty one counties have twenty one percent of their population in prisons and jails. In some counties, the reported growth was slight, but in others, it appeared huge. Jones County Texas saw its Census population rise by 26%. During the 1990s, 355 residents of Jones County chose to pack up and leave the County. At the same time, the state of Texas sent 4,650 prisoners to be incarcerated there.

Incarceration has risen nationally over the last decade, but that’s not true everywhere. Frontier County Nebraska and Clay County Georgia would have reported small population increases had these counties’ populations not included a declining number of prisoners.

Census 2000 reported how many counties grew during the 1990s and how many declined. But if not for the construction of new prison cells, 56 counties labeled as growing would have reported declining populations or no growth at all.

Source: Rose Heyer and Peter Wagner, Too big to ignore: How counting people in prisons distorted Census 2000 and additional research by Rose Heyer and Peter Wagner.

Journalist Alan Elsner’s new book on criminal justice system calls for changing Census

by Peter Wagner, April 22, 2004 Link

Alan Elsner’s new book on the U.S. prison system, Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America’s Prisons includes a call for reforming how the U.S. Census counts prisoners. Counting prisoners in the facility town and not at home is discussed in Chapter 10 about rural prisons and is included in Chapter 12’s list of “Some Modest Suggestions”:

“The way in which the Census Bureau counts inmates as citizens of the jurisdictions where they are jailed for purposes of drawing political boundaries or awarding federal grants seems like a clear case of inequity…. Fixing this would send a strong signal of the nation’s continued commitment to social justice.”

Source: Alan Elsner, Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America’s Prisons, Prentice Hall, 2004, p. 221.

Twenty one counties have twenty one percent of their population in prisons and jails

by Peter Wagner, April 19, 2004 Link

Counting large external populations of prisoners as local residents leads to misleading conclusions about the size and growth of communities. Many of the prison hosting counties have relatively small actual populations, but large prison populations. Twenty one counties in the United States have at least 21% of their population in prison. (See map and table.) In Crowley County, Colorado and West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, one-third of the population consists of prisoners imported from somewhere else.

Many states keep and publish information on the significant counties of origin for their incarcerated population. Of the 4,061 prisoners incarcerated in Union County, Florida, only 52 were convicted there. We can’t provide similar data for Colorado, Louisiana, Texas, and Illinois because these states consider the counties in the table so insignificant that they aggregate them together as “other”.

In 21 counties, at least 21% of the population reported in the Census doesn’t exist in that county except in one important way: on the Census form.

Source: Rose Heyer and Peter Wagner, Too big to ignore: How counting people in prisons distorted Census 2000 and additional research by Rose Heyer and Peter Wagner. Union County conviction numbers are from 2002, the only data readily available. This article makes the conservative assumption that the none of the 52 Union County commitments are prisoners convicted of new offenses while incarcerated in the county. The true number of incarcerated Union County residents is likely to be smaller.