IN ITS ORGANIZING campaign, the U.S. Census made it clear that filling out the form was a civic duty, determining everything from political redistricting to the dispersion of federal funds. Officials don't mention how this affects the two million Americans, many of them from cities, many of them black and Latino, who live in prisons in rural white census districts, and who, to the grim statisticians, are thereby residents of those districts, rather than the ones they came from or where their families live. It's no secret that Republican state senators and one-horse-town mayors conspire to court multimillion-dollar prison contracts as economic development schemes for strapped or middle-class, white, rural counties, living off the city neighborhoods they demonize. But few realize that the census financially rewards successful suitors with federal dollars, fueling the enthusiasm for this country's explosion of prison cells and the medieval drug laws that fill them.

Prisoners boost the populations of sinking rural districts, enabling them to sandtrap federal and state seats that would otherwise go to the booming cities, despite the fact that in forty-eight states you can't vote while in jail, meaning that prisoners can't vote for or against the politicians claiming them as constituents. Since prisoners' low or nonexistent salaries are averaged into local per capita totals, by bringing in high numbers of prisoners, the districts can qualify for larger amounts of federal public-assistance funds by appearing poorer, even though hundreds of new jobs are being created by the prisons themselves. Prisoners, of course, don't receive the benefits, but instead, return to the undercounted communities they came from, searching for federal funds that aren't there for job training, housing, school aid, health care, and scores of other programs that might keep them out of prison again. Meanwhile, a new crop takes over their place-holding role in towns like Vienna, Illinois, Buckeye, Arizona, and Dannemora, New York, near the Canadian border. The pattern repeats from the state of Wisconsin to the colony of D.C., where prisoners are shipped across the Potomac into Virginia, creating post-human landscapes where small towns battle to annex unincorporated prisons at census time and fiercely lobby state legislatures for infusions of prison capital year-round, all the while draining resources from communities of color in the cities.

In New York State, the statistics are staggering. Since 1973, when the state passed the draconian Rockefeller drug laws, which impose lengthy mandatory minimum sentences for low-level drug offenses, the state prison population has skyrocketed from 12,500 to almost 72,000. And according to a report released last year by City Project, ninety-three percent of the state prisons that house this massive population are in Republican districts, half in those of four powerful upstate Republican senators. Meanwhile, seven in ten of New York's prisoners are from New York City. While blacks and Latinos make up only thirty percent of the state's population, eighty-three percent of prisoners are black and Latino, and more than ninety-four percent of those incarcerated for drug offenses.

The Census 2000 numbers reveal the workings of this chilling calculus of bodies for dollars. In Western New York, Wyoming County, which contains two prisons, including Attica, gained 613 residents since the last census. Without its prisons, Wyoming would have lost 3,359. Seeing as how Wyoming has 3,972 prisoners and only 3,587 black and Latino residents, one wonders how many of them are in jail. The trend holds throughout upstate New York: Without its five prisons, instead of gaining 3,988 residents, Franklin County, in the Adirondacks, would have lost 1,435. Prisoners make up twelve percent of the county's population. Without its prisons, Cayuga, in the Finger Lakes region of Central New York, would have lost 3,964 people instead of losing only 959; and instead of gaining 3,428 residents, Greene County would have gained only 574. Nearly a third of residents in Greene's town of Coxsackie, where the mayor openly exults over his prison reinvention plans, are behind bars.

These skewed counting methods bring the dollar incentives and federal approval to a system where a disenfranchised, largely black and Latino population is forcibly relocated to rural white counties for extensive profits -- a practice that could only charitably be called institutional racism. Activists pressing politicians to deliver on their promises to repeal the Rockefeller drug laws this year should attack this practice as well. Until then, the Census will only continue to make for predatory racial and economic politics in the Empire State, and across the country.