DBC Offers Support For “Prisoners of the Census Bill”

Roger Green, the executive director of the DuBois Bunche Center for Public Policy, has offered the center’s enthusiastic support for a bill now before the Legislature in Albany that would change the method of counting prisoners for the collection of census data. The bill would allow prisoners to be counted as part of the population of the areas considered to be their home areas, rather than as residents of the locations of the prisons.

The bill’s prime sponsors are Assemblyman Adriano Espaillat and State Senator Eric T. Schneiderman, both Manhattan Democrats. Under the current system, New York State’s nearly 70,000 prisoners are counted in the locations where they are incarcerated, often upstate locations far from the urban communities where they reside. As a result, they are counted as part of the population of those rural communities, a practice that has a significant impact on how state funds are allocated and how voting districts are carved.

In the 1990, for example, a third of the people of New York State who were recorded as having moved upstate actually “moved” into a newly constructed prison. New York State law prohibits inmates from voting, but they are nonetheless recorded in the Census Bureau’s records. That practice increases the population of the upstate counties whose elected officials, not surprisingly, tend to favor prison expansion. If the prison population were to be recorded differently, for example, seven New York State Senate districts upstate would not meet minimum population requirements and would have to be redrawn

“The practice of including prisoners as residents of the prison districts where they do not vote or otherwise participate is not good public policy,” Mr. Green said. “The current system is filled with inequities. It allows many men and women from urban areas to become an undeserved source of political power for legislators and distant communities to benefit from incarcerating more people for longer sentences. At the same time, it works against the very communities to which these men and women will return.”

Assemblyman Espaillat said that the bill “will accurately document people who are currently incarcerated in the counties and districts where they lived at the time of their arrests.” He added that “the bill will ensure that resources, benefits and the potential political district redesign will benefit their communities of origin.”

Senator Schneiderman said that when incarcerated New Yorkers are counted in the census in the areas where they are inmates, “it means that a smaller number of people there elect their officials proportionately than in the urban areas. It distorts the system of equal representation.”