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Comment by kens | Hacker News Reader

One scary sentence from the linked blog post: "Since the 1990s, the map shows isolated, lightly populated counties with heavily male populations: those are the counties with prisons."

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The 2010 data shows Pulaski Country, Georgia to have a high women population. This is also due to prison population since there is a women's prison there.

I imagine northern Alaska is predominately male still due to the 'wild frontier hard life' aspects more than a prison in the current data, as the probably exception to this analysis.

That presumably is due to the oil extraction going on up there.

Prisoners are included within normal population figures? Interesting.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Some heavily male counties in some decades may be military bases - look for Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, and Cannon AFB in Clovis, New Mexico.

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