By Peter Hardie, Pushback Network
It is time for local and federal government in the United States to play fair.
For decades, civic activists have argued that there is a fundamental flaw in the census count: those serving time in prisons, regardless of how short their sentence, are counted in the census tracts where the prisons are located, not in their home counties.
This is bad policy in many ways. Since the census is the key to both apportionment and the drawing of electoral seats, and prisoners cannot vote in nearly all states, the votes of those living in prison counties (but not in the prison) are substantially weighted, and those of the home counties of the prisoners similarly diluted.
Since federal aid for schools and hospitals, employment services, police and fire departments are also pegged to the census count., communities whose members are not residing there at the time of the count due to a jail sentence, experience a deficit in needed services. These communities are often already economically challenged, exacerbating the lives of residents and returning prisoners.
The dispersal of prisoners far out of their home state to so-called “super-prisons” in places like Texas, creates a new dynamic of biasing census numbers and dilution of voting strength across state lines.
