by Mariah Blake
NARRATION:
Every ten years, Census forms arrive. They come with letters urging people to fill them out as a way of helping their communities. The letters explain that the more people the census counts in a neighborhood, the more money it gets.
The problem is, prisoners are counted in their cells rather than the communities they come from. So their neighborhoods lose out, not only on needed dollars, but also on political representation.
Kenneth Prewitt, former Census Bureau director, explains how the policy siphons money from poor urban neighborhoods to prison towns.
TAPE:
A huge number of federal dollars follow prison populations which means if you take a population from New York City and it's now in some small upstate town that small town is going to get more transportation dollars, more education dollars, more health dollars than it would otherwise get if it didn't have a prison population…In the mean time, the communities from which the prisoners were taken are now deprived of those education, health, transportation, whatever resources.
NARRATION:
The policy deprives New York City neighborhoods of as much as $4.4 million a year. This is because 44,000 of its residents are imprisoned upstate. Critics say this money could help fill the gap in services for former inmates—services that if available might prevent them from committing more crimes. Drug treatment are among those that feel the pinch most.
TAPE:
Sound of train rumbling overhead mixed with hip-hop music. Fade under.
NARRATION:
Adapt, a drug treatment agency, sits in the shadow of rusty subway bridge near the Williamsburg-Bushwick border. All day trains rumble overhead and hip-hop blares from cars parked in the streets outside the office.
Adapt serves some of the neediest people in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods: drug-addicted ex-offenders. But last year, it had to turn hundreds away. Director Divine Pryor blames the Census.
The federal agency that distributes money to drug-treatment programs gives more to neighborhoods with a large number of young people. But the neighborhood Adapt serves has one of the highest incarceration rates in the city, and many of its young people are in prison. The same is true in many of the nation's poorest most drug-infested neighborhoods. The net result: Agencies like Adapt that need the federal money most, get less of it.
Pryor explains the policy's impact by telling the story of Joe.
TAPE:
Because the Census data was not driven in a way that allows us to expand our capacity and provide the services that Joe needs, Joe becomes frustrated and Joe is going to do a number of things. Joe in an act of desperation is either going to commit another crime, victimize someone through domestic violence, through some other act of violence on the street. Any number of things can happen; I mean the sky is the limit.
NARRATION:
It's not just money that city neighborhoods gives up when they send prisoners away. It's political representation.
Prisoners can't vote in most states. But they boost an area's population, thereby increasing the number of representatives it gets in the state senate and assembly. New York City loses two Senate seats as a result of the Census effect, according to one Soros institute researcher. And upstate counties may gain more than that.
Kirstin Levingston of New York University's Brennan Center for Justice says there's another drawback to the way the Census counts prisoners. Because census data doesn't say where prisoners come from, there's no way for communities to know how many residents are imprisoned or to plan for their return.
TAPE:
If we knew that 6000 people were coming back to five neighborhoods in Brooklyn this year chances are policymakers would make decisions based on that information. So it's very important to count people back in their own community because policymakers need to know, because funding decisions need to be made based on the fact that those people are coming home and because political power properly rests in those communities.
NARRATION:
Last October, Levingston and her colleagues made a presentation on this issue to a group from the Census Bureau. The Bureau expressed concern, but says changing the policy would be complicated, and it could have unintended consequences. For instance, if you count prisoners as residents of the communities they come from, you might have to do the same with college students. This could shift resources to wealthy suburban communities. For Columbia Radio News, I'm Mariah Blake.