Census Said to Misplace Many Prisons and Dorms

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By New York Times

Published: 12/10/2001

Across the country, demographers and planners say the US Census Bureau appears to have misplaced entire populations of dozens of prisons and college dormitories. They say the bureau inexplicably removed those populations from census tracts or blocks where the facilities had sat for decades, and deposited them somewhere else.
In New York State, for example, 2,192 inmates at Green Haven Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in the town of Beekman, landed mysteriously in Milan, a smaller town some 27 miles to the north, said Warren A. Brown, a professor of sociology at Cornell University.
In California, the inmates of Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City turned up outside the city limits, the city manager said. The city discovered the problem, he said, when a quarterly payment it receives from the state plummeted because the 2000 census showed the city's population had shrunk.
In Minnesota, the inhabitants of the Federal Correctional Institution in Sandstone turned up down the road 'in a tract that should have almost no one in it,' said Tom Gillaspy, the state demographer. And the tract that houses a state prison in St. Cloud was listed as having no population at all, he said.
Census Bureau officials say any problems are few and relatively insignificant. They note that the bureau did not miss the people; it simply placed some on the wrong side of the street, for example.
The population in question is the so-called group-quarters population, the 7.778 million people who were living in prisons, dormitories and similar facilities at the time the census was taken. The bureau counts people in group quarters separately from the rest of the population.
When the bureau began releasing data from the 2000 census, planners started noticing unexpected shifts in the population counts in a number of places. When they looked to see what might explain surprise increases or drops, some
began to suspect problems in the allocation of group quarters.
'A number of federal and state formulas are based on total population,' said Gillaspy, the Minnesota demographer. 'So when you have 500 or 1,000 people who are misallocated, it's a fairly substantial issue. For the nation as a whole, it might not be that big of a deal. But for that community, it's a huge issue.'
It is unclear how many such problems exist. Since July 1, when it began accepting challenges under its new 'count question resolution' program, the Census Bureau has received 161 challenges.
The Census Bureau the bureau would investigate every challenge. If a population was misplaced, the agency will correct the counts and notify the communities in writing, he said. Those letters, he said, can be shown to other
government agencies as proof of the corrected counts.
As for how mistakes might have occurred, agencies might have given the bureau incorrect addresses - the address of an administrative office, say, rather than that of a particular institution. Or census workers may have failed to go out and verify the address, or may have made clerical errors.

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