Census Bureau releases group quarters data
by Peter Wagner, April 22, 2011
The Census Bureau released the Advance Group Quarters yesterday — earlier than expected — and many have been eagerly awaiting this data so that they can identify prison populations in the redistricting data and avoid prison-based gerrymandering.
The Prison Policy Initiative, in partnership with Demos, issued a press release about the Advance Group Quarters File yesterday. A copy of the press release can be found below.
Late last night, the Prison Policy Initiative finished translating the Bureau’s data in to some user-friendlier formats, including:
- A national shapefile with all of the group quarters data
- Block level tables of the correctional facilities searchable by county
- Google maps of the blocks that contain facilities
- Connecting the new census data to a database of annotations of each of the 5,393 blocks that contain some kind of correctional facility.
These tools are available at http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/data/. Our next conference call workshop to discuss how to use this data to avoid prison-based gerrymandering will be at 10am eastern on Tuesday April 26.
[...] advocacy groups, the Prison Policy Institute and Demos, have released a free look-up tool with block-level tables of correctional facilities, searchable by [...]
[...] Census Bureau made great progress for the 2010 Census by publishing correctional population data in time for state and local governments to avoid prison-based gerrymandering by making populations [...]