Advocates warn Census Bureau about fatal flaws in proposed new residence criteria
The Census Bureau proposes a major rewrite of residence criteria across the board, ensuring an inaccurate 2030 Census. We oppose the proposal to keep counting incarcerated people at a facility instead of at home, and highlight the additional flaws with the proposed new language.
by Aleks Kajstura, November 5, 2026
Last week, the Prison Policy Initiative submitted a comment to the Census Bureau urging them to count incarcerated people at home in the 2030 Census and beyond. In September, the Bureau proposed new regulations that would radically redefine how “usual residence” is determined. The proposal is flawed in a number of ways, but our comment focused on the part that proposes to continue prison gerrymandering by counting incarcerated people at the facility where they are temporarily held instead of at home.
Prison gerrymandering is a problem created because the Census Bureau incorrectly counts incarcerated people as residents of their prison cells rather than their home communities. As a result, when states use Census data to draw new state or local districts, they inadvertently give residents of districts with prisons greater political clout than all other state residents, violating constitutional principles of equal representation. While the Census Bureau drags its feet, states are working to fix prison gerrymandering on their own; in fact, nearly half of the U.S. population now lives in a place that has addressed it.
The proposed residence criteria fail to address any of the well-documented deficiencies in the Bureau’s count of incarcerated people – and even add a few more. We highlight two main problems with the proposed residence criteria for 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 change.
- The language of proposed § 60.9 “Persons confined at correctional or detention facilities” is too vague and incomplete to be implementable. This failure not only guarantees an inaccurate Census, but is indicative of the lack of thought underlying the proposal.
Flawed understanding of residence leads to an inaccurate Census
The proposed residence criteria don’t reflect short stays in jails or frequent transfers between prisons. Most stays in jails last just a few days:
The average time served in local jails is 23 days. There is no national figure on the median time served in jails, but it is likely far shorter given that many people spend only hours or a few days in jail. County level data confirms this: …
A study of 13 Tennessee counties found that 67% of people are released within 7 days. Similarly, the American Jail Association asserts that “75% of people who [enter] the jails in this country are normally released within the first 72 hours.”
Stays in prisons are also much shorter than most people assume:
…42% of people released from state prisons in 2018 served less than a year. And most people in state prisons do not stay in any given facility for long. Incarcerated people are transferred frequently between facilities, at the discretion of the administration. Nearly 75% of incarcerated people are moved between facilities before they go back home.
Counting incarcerated people as if they were residents of a correctional facility does not reflect where they actually live.
Sloppy drafting jeopardizes implementation
Not only is the proposal bad policy, it’s so poorly drafted that it makes consistent implementation impossible. The proposed rule is short: “Persons confined at correctional or detention facilities, including juvenile facilities. Counted at the facility.” It doesn’t even contain a single complete sentence.
The rest of the rules specify the timeframe for determining residence, but this one does not.
[I]ncarceration is not a permanent state of being. So without a reference timeframe, each person responsible for filling out a Census form is left to guess whether this section applies:
- Does it mean being confined on Census day?
- Or at any single point in the enumeration period?
- Or the majority of time within the enumeration period?
- Perhaps being listed on the roster for whichever random day the facility happens to be filling out the Census form?
Not only is this vagueness unworkable, but it also exemplifies the disingenuousness of these proposed regulations, particularly given the Bureau’s claim that the proposed regulations were needed to clarify the reference period for residence.
The proposed residence criteria threaten the accuracy of the 2030 Census
The proposed residence criteria are misguided and poorly drafted, guaranteeing an inaccurate count for the 2030 Census. Their impact is wide-ranging, and our comment joined over 112,000 others in opposition to them.
The inaccuracies built into the proposal will continue to fuel prison gerrymandering and feed even less accurate data to the growing number of states that are adjusting Census data to count incarcerated people at home to avoid prison gerrymandering. In fact, nearly half the country lives in a state that has taken action to end prison gerrymandering on its own. Instead of finally taking this burden off the states, the proposed residence rules threaten to inject more inaccuracy in the 2030 Census.
For more details, including the internal citations we omitted above, see our full comment.
