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With planning for the 2010 census already under way, a question is in play that will affect future elections: where to count the nation's exploding prison population? Since the first census in 1790, prisoners have been counted where they're locked up, not where they previously lived. But now that there are close to 1.5 million prisoners nationwide, the traditional counting method takes voting power away from liberal urban areas like New York City, where most prisoners come from, and gives it to conservative rural communities, where most prisons are. It's time the U.S. Census Bureau gave states the data they need to reverse this dynamic. Prisoners are barred from voting in New York and 47 other states. But they count for purposes of drawing lines for legislative districts. Locating the prisoners in their upstate cells for districting takes their lack of representation a step further, by reducing the political power of the communities from which they come. The traditional method for counting prisoners isn't the only reason that urban communities are underrepresented in government: Low voter turnout, the undercounting of racial minorities and felon disenfranchisement are also to blame. But the prisoner count is especially unsavory because it's reminiscent of the practice of counting slaves as three-fifths of a person that predates the Civil War. The three-fifths count helped keep black people enslaved by increasing the size of the South's congressional delegations. Today, half of the nation's prisoners who are ill-served by the current census practice are African-American. [more

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