Students and prisoners: Census should not count them the same

by Peter Wagner, October 25, 2004 Link

The Census Bureau currently counts college students and prisoners the same way: as residents of the town in which they sleep. This makes sense for students, because they are a part of the surrounding college community, but prisoners have no such ties. The below table from my Actual Constituents: Students and Political Clout in New York report compares how students interact with the surrounding community with how prisoners do not.

Notes: Actual Constituents: Students and Political Clout in New York explains how state legislative districts are drawn, why they are drawn to contain equal numbers of people, why it makes good sense to include students at their college addresses as a part of legislative districts, and why students should be welcomed at the polls. For more contrasts between students and prisoners, see also the analysis in the Brennan Center’s report: One Size Does Not Fit All: Why the Census Bureau Should Change the Way It Counts Prisoners [PDF]

Public rightly insists that that federal prison be excluded from new California county’s districts

by Peter Wagner, October 18, 2004 Link

The California county of Santa Barbara is considering splitting itself in two, and the commission charged with drawing Supervisor districts for the proposed new Mission County ran straight in to controversy by including the 3,137 prisoners at the Lompoc federal prison within one district. Each district was supposed to contain about 41,000 residents, so this was a considerable non-resident boost to the population in one particular district.

According to the Santa Barbara News-Press, the two commissioners charged with drafting the districts “initially included the prison population with the reasoning that ‘just because someone is a convicted felon, they are part of the census population and deserve representation’.” This assumption wasn’t popular with the residents for good reason.

“I’d hate to see you use the prison population; that opens up a whole can of worms,’ said Bill Giorgi of Nojoqui Falls Ranch during a public hearing Monday in Solvang. ‘It’s been used for political purposes in the past.’”

The Chair of the Commission, Ted Tedesco supported the residents who wanted the prisoners excluded from the districts: “We really don’t provide them with any services…. I don’t feel comfortable including them.”

These arguments were persuasive. One of the commissioners that presented the original plan, Jack Boyson, told the Santa Maria Times why prisoners were excluded in the final plan resubmitted in October: “Prisoners don’t require county services, they don’t use our roads.”

Excluding the prisoners at the federal prison from the county redistricting was the right thing to do. Jack Boyson was partially right the first time, though. Prisoners do deserve representation in local government, but not in the community that contains the prison.

The federal prisoners at Lompoc are drawn from throughout the United States. While the Census Bureau counts prisoners as if they were residents of the prison town this is a methodological glitch that predates both modern constitutional redistricting practices and the incarceration boom. The fault is not with the idea of representation, but with the Census. Prisoners should be represented where the Census should count them: at home.

The story in Mission County mirrors what I have discovered elsewhere. Some counties include prisoners in county legislative districts and some exclude them; but every time the public discovers that non-resident prisoners are skewing local democracy, the public objects. In all known cases but one, the county legislature immediately reverses course and excludes the prison population from its districts. This entire controversy and its unnecessary burden on small counties with prisons could be avoided if the Census Bureau counted incarcerated people as part of their actual communities.

Sources: Supervisor districts sketched for split, by Erin Carlyle, Santa Maria Times, October 12, 2004; New lines being drawn in split plan, by Nora K. Wallace, News-Press (Santa Barbara, CA) September 1, 2004; and U.S. Census, Table PCT16 for Lompoc, CA;

Census data asks: Where are the Hispanic children? But it’s the wrong question.

by Peter Wagner, October 11, 2004 Link

Are Hispanics in rural New York, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and other rural places not having children? Or are these the new retirement hotspots for Hispanics? Those are also the wrong questions. The question really should be: Where are the fathers?

By way of background, 25.7% of people of all ethnicities in the U.S. are under the age of 18. This varies from place to place, in part because of where people of certain ages choose to live. For example, many older people move to Florida, so that state has a very low proportion of young people.

Nationally, Hispanics are a much younger population than the total U.S. population, as 35% are under the age of 18. Unfortunately, it is hard to tell whether there are any relevant age-based trends in Latino migration for economic or social reasons because the Census Bureau’s data is overwhelmed by the number of adult Latinos moved to rural counties against their will for purposes of incarceration.

Figure 1 is a map from the Census Bureau’s Mapping Census 2000: The Geography of U.S. Diversity showing the percent of the Hispanic population in each county that is under age 18. This map of Hispanic populations with few children looks a lot like a corresponding map of communities that import large numbers of Hispanic prisoners. (See Figure 2.) The maps of the total population and the White population by age do not show the same correlation with our incarceration maps. It is the data for Blacks and Hispanics that is suffering from this Census glitch.

Figure 1. Many counties (in dark brown) report a significant Latino population, but report few Latinos under the age of 18. In most of these cases, this is not the result of people deciding not to have children, it’s the result of the Census counting large Hispanic prison populations as residents of counties that otherwise do not have a significant Hispanic population. (Map source: U.S. Census Bureau, Mapping Census 2000: The Geography of U.S. Diversity.)

Figure 2. The Census reports that many counties have a large percentage of their Latino population incarcerated in correctional facilities.

When retirees pull up roots and move to Florida, they set down new roots of residency in their new homes. But prisoners don’t become a part of the local community, so it makes little sense for the Census Bureau to credit the prison towns with their presence. The best solution, and the only one that would allow legislative districts to be drawn more fairly, would be for the Census Bureau to count prisoners as residents of their pre-incarceration addresses.

Anything less offers a misleading portrait of U.S. diversity.

Source: Too Big to Ignore: How counting people in prisons distorted Census 2000 by Rose Heyer and Peter Wagner, April 2004