How to count inmates historically has not been a big issue. But the fast-expanding prison population -- now about 1.5 million -- is prompting a debate because government spending and electoral district boundaries are in part decided by population. Opponents say the practice unfairly rewards rural, often sparsely populated regions where many prisons are built, at the expense of the cities where many prisoners had resided.

...The issue pits the bureau, resistant to change its long-standing procedure, against activists who say that the practice results in misleading demographic data and large distortions in the size of electoral districts. It also pits rural lawmakers against urban ones.

The Census Bureau is expected to release its report this month. There should be a change. Parole boards pretty much dictate that when an inmate is released, he or she has to go back home. Prisons are usually in rural parts of the state. Prisoners have no say in where they are designated and even less in where they may be transferred during their terms of incarceration. Also, consider how many inmates are from urban and inner city areas. By designating them as residents of a rural area far from their home, their home district doesn't get to count them an may lose funding.

Inmates' domocile at the time of incarceration should be the operative factor, not where the state or feds decides to warehouse them. Here's an example of the present policy's unfairness:

More than 40,000 convicts from New York City, in the southern part of the state, are housed in prisons upstate. Seven state Senate districts would not qualify as districts without their prison population, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, an activist group. More worrisome, the group says, is that two politicians from those areas, Republican state Sens. Dale Volker and Michael Nozzolio, lead the committees on the legal code and crime and have been enthusiastic backers of long-standing, controversial laws that require long prison sentences for drug crimes.