Posted by PeterWagner at 02/15/10 04:32PM        Post ID#: #105

Actually, the Washington State Constitution in Article VI, Section 4, says that prisoners are not residents of Walla Walla. Most state constitutions make the same point, and back when prison populations were small and redistricting on the basis of population was not a clear constitutional requirement, nobody noticed.

But today in some legislative districts, especially county board districts, substantial portions of the population is disenfranchised prisoners, giving the actual residents disproportionate influence over government decisions. That runs afoul of the federal "one person one vote" requirement that all districts must have the same resident population. In response, more than 100 counties around the country fix the census problem by taking the prisoners out of the data prior to redistricting, and some states are mulling similar changes.

All the Bureau has done is make that process easier. They won't be counting prisoners at their home addresses in 2010, and they won't be publishing anything they haven't published in the past. All they are doing it taking one table about group quarters (which includes prisons) and publishing it a few months earlier.

The timing is significant, because the prison count data used to arrive too late for redistricting committees to use it. But the odds that this "new" data product would somehow change the very detailed formulas that distribute federal or state aid seems more than a little unlikely.

So since the prisoners can't vote, and since the Washington State Constitution says that they aren't residents of Walla Walla, Washington would be right to not credit the prisons to Walla Walla. But if Washington wants to go further and count prisoners at home, they won't find the Census Bureau's "new" data product much help.

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Updated Aug. 21 2009

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