Site Network: Prison Policy Initiative | Prisoners of the Census
The prisoner miscount creates a multitude of problems for people who use census data for planning and research purposes. Counting large 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 few actual residents, but large prison populations, and a staggering twenty-one counties in the United States are at least 21% prisoners. In Crowley County, Colorado and West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, a full third of the population consists of prisoners who previously lived somewhere else. In 173 counties, more than half of the Black residents reported in the Census are actually prisoners.
Too big to ignore: How counting people in prisons distorted Census 2000 (2004) was the first national analysis of distortions in census data due to prisoner inclusion. The report looks at the figures for county population size, growth, race, ethnicity, gender and income. In October 2006, the authors made the underlying data available to the public.
In the Prisoners of the Census blog, we frequently write about the impact of prisoner miscount on statistics and planning. A sampling of essays: