From Prison Policy Institute:
The Census Bureau is gearing up to start one of its main tests leading to the 2030 Census, and just announced changes that will make their counts of incarcerated people even less accurate than the last Census. The Prison Policy Initiative submitted a comment letter explaining how the proposed test changes not only fail to count incarcerated people at home, but guarantee failed counts at correctional facilities, too. This Census Bureau failure will make efforts to address prison gerrymandering even harder.
Prison gerrymandering is a problem created because the Census Bureau incorrectly counts incarcerated people as residents of their prison cells rather than their home communities. As a result, when states use Census data to draw new state or local districts, they inadvertently give residents of districts with prisons greater political clout than all other state residents. While the Census Bureau drags its feet, states are working to fix prison gerrymandering on their own; in fact, nearly half of the U.S. population now lives in a place that has addressed it. Now the Census Bureau is about to make their work harder.
The Bureau has a decades-long pattern of failing to accurately count people in “correctional group quarters” — the Census term for prisons and jails — and this test was an opportunity to correct course. The Bureau was actually planning to use this test — officially called the “2026 Operational Test in Support of the 2030 Census” — to try out new procedures for gathering counts from correctional facilities in hopes of improving the process. Instead, it suddenly reversed course and is cutting all testing in prisons and jail.
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