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March 19, 2006

Mark Bennett: If a coalition of congressmen get their way, Vigo County and Congressional District 8 could be facing a serious population decrease

Maybe Vigo County needs a bronze bust of Roseanne Rosannadanna, engraved with her famous saying, “It’s always something.”

We already found out last week from the U.S. Census Bureau that more people (3,256) deserted Vigo County between 2000 and 2005 than any other county in Indiana.

Now, if a coalition of congressmen get what they want, by the time the Census people make their 2010 count, our population could dip below 100,000 for the first time since 1940, even if we built a giant fence to keep everybody here, and even if our birth and death rates don’t change.

How is that possible?

Well, since the Census Bureau began its decennial head counts in 1790, prisoners have been counted as residents of the county in which they are incarcerated. That means the 2,920 inmates at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute were included among the 105,848 people counted as residents of Vigo County in the 2000 U.S. Census.

But last November, President Bush approved an appropriations bill from Congress, directing the Census Bureau to study a new method of counting prisoners in the population tallies — shifting their residences to “their pre-incarceration addresses.” The premise is that inmates have more valid connection to their home communities than those surrounding their places of imprisonment.

“A fair and accurate Census should count inmates as residents of the place from which they came and where they are most likely to return, not as residents of a far-off prison,” Rep. Jose E. Serrano (D-N.Y.) said in a prepared statement.

Serrano and other congressmen from urban areas — from which the largest percentage of prisoners previously lived — say their districts unfairly lose federal aid and political strength based on population size when those inmates get counted as residents of the usually rural districts where prisons are located.

“What we have is a pretty significant distortion of how our government works,” said Peter Wagner of the Prison Policy Initiative by telephone from its offices in East Hampton, Mass.

So with a congressional mandate signed by the president, the Census Bureau reviewed its policy.

The bureau released the results of its study three weeks ago. It concluded that interviewing all prisoners in federal, state and local correctional facilities to determine their “permanent home of record” would cost approximately $250 million and create logistical problems, from the security of the Census takers to enlisting the full cooperation of each of these prisons and jails. Using existing records, as an option, could be inaccurate because many of the correctional institutions use no validation procedure to ensure the addresses listed by the inmates are correct, the study said.

The Census’ report indicated few benefits and numerous problems with changing the 216-year-old process.

Without elaborating further, Mark Tolbert, deputy of public information for the bureau, told the Tribune-Star, “The report speaks for itself.”

Serrano issued a statement critical of the bureau’s report, saying “it only makes excuses for why they don’t believe it should be done.”

When contacted by telephone, the congressman’s media spokesman Philip Schmidt would only say Serrano would continue to review options about what to do next.

To have a new prisoner home residence policy in place by the 2010 count, it would have to be approved before the Census Bureau’s 2008 “dress rehearsal,” Wagner said. “That’s still two years away, so there’s still time for that.”

If it happens, rural areas could lose in various ways.

Last week, the Census Bureau issued its 2005 population estimate, and it showed Vigo County with 102,592 residents — a 3-percent drop since the 2000 count. If those 2,920 inmates at the Federal Correctional Complex are counted in their various hometowns around the country, Vigo County’s numbers will drop even more significantly. That could affect the county’s ability to attract federal and state grants, said Vigo Auditor Jim Bramble.

“With a lot of the formulas that are necessary — distributions from federal and state governments — one of the formulas in those is often the population of the county,” Bramble said. “The other way it would hurt us is our representation in Congress and the Legislature. Potentially, with a [2,900]-person shift in our population, we might lose a legislator, but I’m not for sure.”

Critics of the current system say the inmate population skews the demographic picture of a prison’s community and gives those small cities and towns undeserved clout and preference. Allocations by federal and state governments often take into account communities’ average earnings and minority population, and both are affected by the presence of a prison in a rural area, according to statistics.

The Wabash Valley Correctional Facility houses 2,030 inmates in the Sullivan County town of Carlisle. In the 2000 Census, Sullivan County had 21,751 residents. Among minorities living in the county, there were 928 black people in the Census count. But 891 of those people — or 96 percent — were inmates at the prison. No county in Indiana had a higher percentage of its minority population incarcerated.

While Greencastle native Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman was a student at Duke University, she researched the issue from 2001 to 2003. Her project included a survey of Indiana state representatives, asking them, “Which inmate would you feel was truly more a part of your constituency? A. An inmate who is currently incarcerated in a prison located in your district but has no other ties to your district. Or B. An inmate who is currently incarcerated in a prison in another district but who lived in your district before being convicted and/or whose family still lives in your district.”

Of the 44 lawmakers who responded, 40 chose answer B. None chose A. (Oddly, one checked both answers, two didn’t answer, and one wrote, “I really haven’t considered any inmate a part of my constituency.”)

“That was one of the most telling pieces of research I did,” said Stinebrickner-Kauffman, who now works for the Mellman Group, a political consulting firm in Washington, D.C.

The current policy wasn’t such an issue in the past. But the U.S. prison population has mushroomed since 1980, and now totals 2,267,787, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School. That number, which Stinebrickner-Kauffman calls “enormous,” exceeds all other countries in the world.

Thus, the Census prisoner residency policy could become a tug-of-war between cities and rural communities. In Illinois, for example, 60 percent of the state’s inmates claim Cook County, where Chicago is located, as their home, according to Wagner’s statistics. Yet 99 percent of the Illinois prison cells are elsewhere.

And here in Indiana, the population in the Eighth Congressional District included 8,089 prisoners in the 2000 Census. The Eighth includes the state prison at Carlisle and the federal complex at Terre Haute. None of the state’s other eight congressional districts had more than 6,600 prisoners. So a potential loss of the prison population could hit the Eighth District hardest.

Bramble points out that communities with prisons encounter expenses by serving as home to such operations. Roads leading to it must be maintained for visitors and employees. “And if a visitor comes to our town and needs services, they’re not going to call the St. Louis Sheriff’s Department,” he said.

Of course, the one thing that could mitigate the issue is if people would do the right thing, stay out of trouble and stay out of prison. Then their hometowns would never be in question.

Mark Bennett can be reached at mark.bennett@tribstar.com or (812) 231-4377.

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