vivian shaw

The Census and the cost/benefits of the US prison system

Eric Lotke wrote an interesting article in The Huffington Post today about the 2010 Census and Maryland’s decision to count prisoners for the places where they actually live rather than the districts where the prisons are located.

“Eighteen percent of the population credited to Maryland House of Delegates District 2B (near Hagerstown) is actually incarcerated people shipped in from other parts of the state. In Somerset County, 64 percent of the population in the First Commission District is a large prison, giving each resident in that district nearly three times as much influence as residents in other districts. People in prison are generally not permitted to vote, but their bodies still count for purposes of legislative apportionment.”

I was familiar with the concept of the United States incarceration system as a money-making architecture (“the prison industrial complex”), specifically with relation to allegations that budgeting for state prisons is often planned based on poor reading scores for elementary-aged children, but knew very little about the role of prisons in skewing representational districts. Lotke explains this theory quite well—while the article itself assumes that the reader is at least somewhat familiar with the process of drawing up congressional districts, he took the time to clarify some readers’ questions and provide even greater detail in the comments section. The idea of incarcerated individuals functioning as both economic and political commodities really runs counterintuitive to the American imagination, as we tend to think of criminals and prisoners in terms of how threatening they are to civil order. While many individuals, of all political stripes, view the US prison system as bloated, it’s hard to imagine Lotke’s and his colleagues’ argument—that the main role of incarcerated people is to financially resource big capitalists, essentially making them “victims”—would resonate with anyone who does not already align with a left-, or even Marxist-, leaning. (For what it’s worth, my own political biases do incline me to find Lotke’s thesis appealing.)

The Huffington Post also published a more humorous article related to the Census, theorizing why hipsters in Williamsburg may not be completing their Census forms (and there are some really ridiculous quotes in this piece!). Of course, this reportage, does not consider how non-hipster groups—Hasedic Jews and Puerto Ricans among others— may play into this low response rate. But still a fun read.