DHS dodges its obligation
OUR OPINION: AGENCY SHOULD FUND TRANSITION COSTS FOR FREED CUBAN MARIEL DETAINEES

A Cuban detainee recently was released by the Department of Homeland Security in Colorado, given a bus ticket to Miami, some sweets -- and no money. Arriving three days later, he was weak and famished from the cross-country, 1,700-mile ordeal. Camillus Health Concern has treated at least five recently released Cuban detainees found homeless on the streets of Miami; three men arrived via Greyhound Bus with nothing more than their corrections ID and in need of social services. How shameful and wrong of DHS to shirk its responsibilities.

I said I'd get back to it. Here's why.

Eric Cadora shows how incarceration is concentrated in particular Brooklyn neighborhoods
Posted on January 24, 2005

The Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York report was able to quantify the population loss to New York City from the Census Bureau practice of assigning prisoners residence to the prison location rather than their homes, and the report was able to determine how this benefits up-state prison districts. In 2000, New York City had 43,740 of its residents credited to the communities that contain prisons. As much as 7% of one upstate district's population is prisoners. Counting prisoners as prison-town residents reduces the number of actual residents in these districts, enhancing the weight of a vote in those prison districts. By extension, this vote enhancement dilutes the votes of residents elsewhere in the state.

then there's this pdf:

While all rural communities hosting prisons receive some amount of extra funds, actual amounts vary greatly from state to state. Census figures are used to distribute $185 billion a year in population-based federal aid plus additional state monies, but only a portion of these funds are distributed on a strict population basis. State school aid for example, is sometimes based on Census figures not of the entire population, but of school age children.

The effects are myriad but difficult to track:

• Prisoners’ low incomes are included in the Census per capita income figures, making prison communities look poorer and more eligible for federal poverty-related grants that rely on per-capita income as was the case in Greene County, NY, home to two state prisons. (Many poverty programs rely on household income figures, which by definition, prisoners do not effect.)
• When Arizona passed a law allowing under-populated towns to annex prisons within 15 miles of their borders, Gila Bend and Buckeye fought for the prisons and the federal aid each prisoner represented.
• Four Illinois villages appear 5 to 8 times larger by Census counts of prisoners.
• After Census 2000, the New York towns of Beacon and Fishkill argued with the Census about whether the Fishkill Correctional Facility was in Beacon or Fishkill. At stake was $85,000 in county tax revenues.
• The Mayors of Mansfield and Warren, Ohio panicked when the Census miscounted prisons and jail inmates confined within their towns. Without the inmates, the cities would have dropped below 50,000 people and lost their guaranteed funding for federal Community Development Grants.
• Minnesota was so concerned about counting all of their prisoners, they paid them each $1 to fill out the forms.

Our prison policy is in large degree an income redistribution scheme.