JAILHOUSE BLUES

The founding fathers envisioned a simple head count when they decreed
that the country would conduct a census once every 10 years for the
purpose of apportioning representation in Congress. Over the
centuries, the question of who lives where has become more
complicated. The census already has to determine where retirees with
two homes live or how to count people who live in one city and work in
another. It should be simpler counting prisoners.

A quirk in the residency rules counts inmates as "residents'' of the
prisons even though most are held only for brief periods before
returning to their actual homes, which are often hundreds of miles
away. The current system clashes with the principle of one person, one
vote - by artificially inflating the populations of rural electoral
districts and leaving the urban areas to which the prisoners will
return underrepresented, particularly in state legislatures.

This prison census was less significant 30 years ago, when the prison
population was less than 200,000. But mandatory sentencing policies
for drug offenses have driven the prison population across the nation
to a staggering 1.4 million. These new offenders are overwhelming
black and Hispanic people from inner cities. The prison construction
boom, however, has taken place mainly in white, rural counties that
have since turned prison inmates into a kind of cash crop.

The citizens of large cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles
have helped to pay the cost of building and maintaining state prisons,
which provide much-needed jobs in many rural districts. They did not,
however, count on also giving these generally underpopulated areas
extra political influence as well.

The nonvoting inmates - sometimes called "imported constituents'' -
are often counted in rural districts where legislators vote against
the interest of their home cities. Their presence in the census count
of prison neighborhoods distorts population statistics and creates
legislative districts that fly in the face of federal laws requiring
districts to be roughly the same size - plus or minus a variation of
about 5 percent. A recent series of reports - from the Brennan Center
for Justice at New York University, the Prison Policy Initiative in
Massachusetts and the Urban Institute in Washington - shows that many
states have achieved the appearance of parity by drawing the state
legislative districts in rural areas so that they include the largest
possible number of inmates. Among the 10 states that have experienced
the most prison growth, there are more than a dozen counties where at
least one in five "residents'' is an inmate.

The simplest and fairest solution would be to permit inmates to fill
out census forms with their home addresses instead of automatically
counting them as residents of the prison county. Most prisoners will
have returned to their hometowns long before the next census rolls
around. There, they will often be in need of both government services
and political consideration.