This year, there are some exciting ideas about changing up how people are counted and for what jurisdiction they are counted. One important idea advanced by the Prison Policy Initiative www.prisonersofthecensus.org is to count prisoners including families in detention where they are from not where they are incarcerated. Says PPI about New York State:
“Prisons are increasingly located far from prisoners’ homes. Only 10% of prisoners are from rural counties in upstate New York, but 75% of the state’s prisoners are housed there, and all 43 prisons built since 1976 are upstate. These upstate prison counties are predominantly White, even when the non-voting prison populations are included. The geographical disparities in prison construction translate into clear racial disparities: 98% of New York prison cells are located in Senate districts whose population is disproportionately White. When it counts prisoners as residents of prison towns, then, the Census effectively transfers disenfranchised minority populations to predominantly white legislative districts.”
Much of the work to advance this idea is focused on litigation and there are few organizing groups at the table. Yet, you can just imagine how much could change if folk were counted in their own communities. When you think of it, it’s a crazy double whammy – communities have to bear the crime, the costs, the trauma, the loss and break up of families and the loss of the vote and funding, too.
Other ongoing struggles to change up count methodology include:
- Counting same sex couples
- How to best count undocumented – use population estimates based on modeling data and/or verifying or cross tabulation with additional sources? What are the sources for cross reference? ICE, Social services? Schools? How does this look in a post Patriot Act world?
- Racial/ethnic categories – addressing the tension between categories that accurately reflect us but don’t dilute the funding. For example, when the 2000 Census made changes in ethnic categories, it made it easier to acknowledge more than one racial/ethnic heritage. However, it also diluted racial/ethnic counts for race conscious measures like the Voting Rights Act that works to protect “majority minority” districts.
