by TChris

According to Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, the thirty year effort to build and fill U.S. prisons has been great for the rural areas where prisons are generally located, but not so good for urban areas that lose representation in the census when urban dwellers are counted in the rural prisons that house them.

[B]ecause the Census Bureau counts prison inmates as residents of the legislative districts in which they're incarcerated, the relocation of inmates -- who are not allowed to vote in 48 states -- skews both the distribution of government funds and the apportionment of legislative representation.

The distortion in representation caused by enumeration of prisoners tends to favor rural residents, whites, and Republicans, at the expense of urban residents, blacks, and Democrats. ... [T]he presence of disenfranchised blacks in rural prisons increases the representation of white, rural, Republican voters both in the House and in state legislatures.

Politicians shouldn't be given an incentive to incarcerate more people for the sake of boosting populations in particular political districts. Stinebrickner-Kauffman makes a strong argument that the Census Bureau should correct this problem by counting inmates as living in their "homes of record."