It's something of a controversy about whether the Census should count prisoners as living in the place where they are imprisoned or in the place where they formerly lived. The policy of counting them as living in the place where they are imprisoned diverts federal and state monies away from the places that they came from.

> The policy of counting them as living in the place where they are imprisoned diverts federal and state monies away from the places that they came from.

I think, viewed more carefully, one would be forced to recognize that the effect described results instead from the policy of allocating money for programs by total Census counts without considering the fitness of those counts to the purpose of the particular programs and making suitable adjustments (and that that policy is going to have some infelicities, if not the exact same ones, no matter what general policies are adopted for Census counts.)

Prisoners are people.

Prisoners live in a geographical location.

Seems kind of obvious that prisoners living within the bounds of a geographic area would be included in counts of people living in that geographic area.

If census information is used to apportion government funds, you'd want the money to go to where they were from (which, if it has such a high number of prisoners that their population numbers are affected, probably really need the money), as opposed to going to whatever community managed to lobby to build the prison.

They do not live there by choice and they are very isolated from the rest of the population. It is different enough I would like to see numbers with and without.