Wow! The Census, Prisons and Legislative Maps!
Dang! A juicy census story! This one is really quite despicable!
The 2010 census [US] should include a test run at counting the nation’s 1.4 million prison inmates at their permanent addresses instead of in prisons. That would help bring an end to a corrosive but little known practice that distorts the political process in virtually every corner of the country.
Inmates are denied the right to vote in all but two states. But state lawmakers treat them as residents of the prisons when drawing legislative maps, to inflate the head count in lightly populated rural areas where prisons are typically built. This creates legislative districts where none would ordinarily be, shifting political influence from the heavily populated urban districts where inmates live.
Once inflated, these towns and counties siphon an outsized portion of state and federal aid. Politicians in districts with prisons sometimes brag openly about the windfall, as they mock “constituents” who are powerless to remove them from office and are packed onto buses and driven hundreds of miles to their real homes the minute they leave the prison walls.
From the NYTimes Editorial: Ending the Prison Windfall
Unbelievable! Here is a link to the National Research Council Report: Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census. The nice thing about NRC Books is they can be read online in pdf form for free!
I don’t know if you remember when I brought the issue up about my social insurance number being linked to my benefit plan at my workplace and my consequent rant about this intrusion on privacy (a blog entry).
At that time, my journalist friend LL (who has done quite a lot of research on privacy issues) wrote me back:
“It’s as creepy as Stats Can hiring freaking Lockheed Martin
to do the data crunching on any of their online census forms. (BW found
out about that ~after~ he filled out the online census form.) Stats Can
says Lockheed Martin can’t look at the data — they just provide hardware
(and IBM and Transcontintental Printing provide software and
printing…). But with the fascist U.S. Patriot Act a creepy reality, it’s scary to think Lockheed Martin has ANYTHING to do with the census (not to mention
ethical issues of doing biz with the War Industry).
Did you know that Stats Can has now outsourced census data collection to Lockheed Martin?
I think this was raised because I mentioned that BC has outsourced data collection for its provincial health care plan data to IBM. Something I am concerned about.
Obviously there are lots of issues regarding census collection. I fear the next move will be to give the contract to Diebold (makers of voting machines as well as ATMs ….).
Comment by xtie — January 20, 2007 @ 1:28 am
Hey Vix! There was quite a campaign about the census. If i recall correctly lockeed martin was incharge of the web census, so many of the campaigns were directed at getting people to fill out the census on paper. There is increasingly more problems related to the outsourcing of private data and there are many breaches. If you are very intereseted in this topic, you may want to read - http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1622&Itemid=196
Comment by Administrator — January 20, 2007 @ 1:37 am
Thanks T for this blogsite! Very good info. and I have quite a few specific concerns vis a vis privacy in my workplace in BC … the expectation is from my health authority is would seem that I request people’s SIN and public health numbers when they seek addictions treatment (something that was not done in Ontario … no request for OHIP number and SIN was not even mentioned). BC is very conservative in so many ways! I know a media person here who can f/u on these privacy issues and will forward the michaelgeist site.
I am also involved at the moment in a federal Competition Bureau complaint … see what happens but it is good to know that it takes only six people who are concerned about an issue in the marketplace regarding fraud, deception, etc. to lodge a complaint that has to be investigated by the federal Competition Bureau. Yesterday, the United Church of Canada offered its support in terms of the complaint … that is so great!
Comment by xtie — January 24, 2007 @ 12:32 am