Inmates boost rural census

By Dan Chapman

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Nearly one of every four people in Calhoun County sits behind bars. They can’t vote, check out a library book or drive county-maintained roads.

But they can bring the southwest Georgia county a lot of federal money while bolstering the community’s political clout.

The U.S. census, currently under way, counts prisoners where they resided on April 1. While most prisoners hail from Atlanta, Savannah, Augusta and other cities, they mainly do time in state prisons and federal penitentiaries in rural areas.

A backlash is rising, though. Urban legislators, census experts and prison advocates decry so-called “prison gerrymandering” and have urged Congress to change the residency rules.

Rural Georgia’s gain is urban Georgia’s pain: Financially strapped cities want their fair share of $450 billion dispensed annually by Washington, particularly in a recession when budgets are tight. The money, based largely on census counts, pays for roads, Medicaid, lunch programs and other federal programs.

“That’s not fair,” said state Rep. Bob Bryant (D-Garden City), who sits on the House Legislative and Congressional Reapportionment Committee. “The money should go back to where people come from. That area should benefit.”

Prisons aren’t the only heavily and temporarily populated institutions skewing financing formulas and political representation. People residing in universities, colleges, nursing homes and military installations also will be counted in those communities, regardless of where they hail from.

Athens, home to the University of Georgia, will tally thousands of constituents who are not likely to stick around after graduation.

It costs cities and counties money, though, to support prisons and universities, including costs of roads and services such as law enforcement.

“The prison does cost our county some money and some wear, tear and stress,” said Richard West, vice chairman of the Calhoun County Commission. “There are some pluses and minuses both ways. But it all comes out in the wash.”

About 63,000 people are incarcerated in local, state, federal and private prisons in Georgia, mostly in rural lock-ups, according to the federal and state departments of correction. Prisoners skew local demographics with potentially far-reaching financial implications.

Males make up 93 percent of the state prison population, the Georgia Department of Corrections reported recently. Yet statewide, 49 percent of the population is male.

African-Americans comprise two-thirds of Georgia’s prisoners and less than one-third of the state’s population.

Nearly 15 percent of Georgians live in poverty. Only half the prisoners say they’re middle-class, according to Corrections officials.

The Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, reported recently that the census guided the distribution of $447 billion in fiscal 2008. Most of the money is given to states via large grants for programs for poor people and highway construction. It’s then parceled out locally.

Counties, therefore, have a hefty financial incentive to count as many people as they can, prisoners included.

About 6,200 people live in Calhoun County — 1,638 of them housed at the Calhoun State Prison in Morgan.

“We’ve got agriculture and we’ve got the prison. We’ve got no other industrial activities,” said West, who owns the IGA in nearby Edison. “And there’s 300 jobs in this county that wouldn’t be there if the prison wasn’t here. We need those jobs.”

West isn’t bothered that the prisoners, who require very little by way of county services, pad Calhoun’s federal payments. Poor counties, he reckons, deserve all the help they can get.

Less than 1 percent of all Georgia prisoners come from Calhoun County, according to the DOC, while 11.6 percent of the state’s prison population calls Fulton County home and another 5.9 percent comes from DeKalb County.

Atlanta’s two major counties combined account for about one of every six prisoners in Georgia.

“If prisoners are from Atlanta, then Atlanta should be given credit for them,” Bryant said.

Peter Wagner, executive director of the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative, said “phantom constituents” pose a more serious problem than simply the misallocation of federal dollars.

After each census, local and state officials trek to the State Capitol to redraw legislative districts. By counting prisoners, Wagner says, county commission and state House and Senate districts can be unfairly padded with constituents who can’t vote. Federal law requires that all districts be based on equal population so that each constituent has the same access to, and representation in, his or her government.

Calhoun County voters, therefore, have 25 percent more power than voters in similar-size legislative districts that don’t have a prison. In other words, it pays — both literally and politically — to live near a prison.

Wagner’s Massachusetts-based research organization studies the impact of “prison gerrymandering” on political representation. Wagner discovered that nine Georgia House districts derive more than 5 percent of their population from “incarcerated, disenfranchised people.”

“These counties get padded at the expense of everybody else in Georgia,” Wagner said. “The whole idea of our democracy is that society makes better decisions if everyone is given the same say in government.”

Voters in House District 141 in Milledgeville have more say than any other district in Georgia, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. Eleven percent of its constituents sit behind bars. But Rep. Rusty Kidd (I-Milledgeville) dismisses any notion that his constituents are disproportionately powerful.

“When you look at the numbers, and how the real world works, it’s just one of those things that don’t make sense,” Kidd said.

The U.S. Census Bureau says it would cost about $250 million to interview all federal, state and local prisoners to determine home addresses. And the 2010 census is too far along for Congress to mandate any changes.

But state legislatures themselves can determine where prisoners are counted for reapportionment. The Census Bureau will release prisoner information early, by next spring, so that state officials can decide where prisoners should be counted.