“Welcome to Citiwire.net! Cities are “on the prowl” worldwide, picking up notes from each other, far more often than one would ever think — a phenomenon described by the Citistates Group’s new Associate, Tim Campbell. I’ll be picking up on the international angles directly at the World Urban Forum in Rio de Janeiro the next two weeks, and reporting from there. … My column this week focuses on a real domestic injustice — prisoners being “counted,” for apportionment and federal aid allocation purposes, at the mostly-rural locations of most current-day penitentiaries, not the cities where most of them come from.” -- Neal Peirce
Neal Peirce
For Release Sunday, March 14, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
Should the Census count inmates as residents of the prisons where they’re held — often hundreds of miles from home? Or should they be tallied as citizens of the cities or counties they came from?
An agreement just reached between the U.S. Census Bureau and Rep. William Clay Jr. (Mo.), the chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees census issues, may signal an historic shift in how the bureau reports prisoners to state and local governments. The accord creates at least a chance for prisoners’ overwhelmingly urban home areas to get a better break on legislative representation.
Counting prisoners where they’re incarcerated didn’t matter a lot when America had modest numbers of inmates, usually held in institutions near their homes.
But all that’s changed in the last three decades as America’s prisoner counts have soared from about 500,000 in 1980 to 2.3 million today. The combination of tough “law-and-order” politics and development of a vast “prison industrial complex” has led to confinement of predominantly city-based convicts in hundreds of new prisons in small town areas.
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Tim Campbell
For Release Sunday, March 14, 2010
Citiwire.net
Cities in the modern world are beginning to share some features with the city-states of millennia past — communicating, trading, competing. But they’re two differences: Today it’s nation states, not city-states, that occasionally go to war. And unlike the walled cities that harbored flourishing trade in Medieval Europe, today there are literally thousands of cities on the rise, and looking outward in search not of silk and spices, but rather sources of finance, global talent, and most of all, good ideas.
But the search for knowledge isn’t always easy. And there can be resistance. My colleague Neal Peirce recently chided the short-sightededness of journalistic watchdogs who see in mayoral travel only junkets, not fruit-bearing study of better and smarter practices elsewhere.
But here’s the big news that really counts. It’s that the 500 largest cities on the planet are sending delegations to visit each other, repeatedly and consistently every year, on the order of thousands of study trips annually. The cities are selected carefully, so that visitors may acquire valuable knowledge to speed improvements back home.
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