Poor communities losing political & financial clout because of how census counts prisoners need to work together: Join Prisonersofthecensus.org

Attorney Peter Wagner teaches, lectures, and writes about the negative impact of mass incarceration in the United States. See http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/ His current focus is on demonstrating - through graphics, legal research, and state-by-state analyses - how the U.S. Census Bureau's practice of counting the nation's mostly urban prisoners as residents of the often remote communities in which they are incarcerated distorts the democratic process. The New York Times editorial board has written 11 editorials supporting his efforts to change the way prisoners are counted, and the Boston Globe identified him as the "leading public critic" of the prisoner miscount. He has presented his research at national and international conferences and meetings, including a Census Bureau Symposium, a meeting of the National Academies, and keynote addresses at Harvard and Brown Universities. Mr. Wagner's publications include Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York (2002); The Prison Index: Taking the Pulse of the Crime Control Industry (2003); and, with Eric Lotke, Prisoners of the Census: Electoral and Financial Consequences of Counting Prisoners Where They Go, Not Where They Come From, [PDF] 24 Pace L. Rev. 587 (2004).

Recently, I saw Princeton Professor Melissa Lacewell-Harris on The Rachel Maddow Show talking about how the Census which is used to distribute federal $$$  undercounts black and brown communities by counting  prisoners in the counties where they are incarcerated rather than their home communities, ie where they come from and are most likely to return. She specifically cited  Illinois as example where the Illinois Department of Correction (IDOC) prisons are all downstate and disproportionately populated by African-American and Latino youth from Chicago-area and other urban centers, in the state.  See Melissa Harris-Lacewell discusses millions of $$$ lost to Chicago's black & brown communities due to census undercount on Rachel Maddow Show.   A study for the Census regarding impacts of undercounts shows 31 states and D.C. have lost $4.1 billion and the 58 largest counties adversely affected by the undercount  are estimated to have lost  $3.6 billion, or $2,913 per uncounted person. See Cook County, Illinois lost over $261 million due to U.S. Census undercounts that could have been used to fund exoffender training and other supports

  

 

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