Site Network: Prison Policy Initiative | Prisoners of the Census

About the Prison Policy Initiative

The non-profit, non-partisan Prison Policy Initiative documents the impact of mass incarceration on individuals, communities, and the national welfare. We produce accessible and innovative research to empower the public to participate in creating better criminal justice policy.

Since its 2001 founding, the Prison Policy Initiative has sponsored a number of innovative projects:

Our work has been featured in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the NAACP's The New Crisis magazine, Newhouse News Service, City Limits, Gotham Gazette, Prison Legal News, Alternet and the Boston Herald. We've given talks at Harvard University, Yale Law School, the University of Buffalo Law School, and at a number of national criminal justice conferences.

In addition to our popular atlas and graph website features, we have published numerous articles on topics ranging from public perceptions of crime to the racial and economic factors behind prison expansion.

Staff

Peter Wagner, JD, Executive Director. Peter Wagner teaches, lectures, and writes about the negative impact of mass incarceration in the United States. His current focus is on working to demonstrate - through graphics, legal research, and state-by-state analyses - the distortion of the democratic process that results from the U.S. Census Bureau's practice of counting the nation's mostly urban prisoners as residents of the often remote communities in which they are incarcerated. The New York Times editorial board has written nine editorials supporting his efforts to change the way prisoners are counted, and the Boston Globe identified him as the "leading public critic" of the prisoner miscount. He has presented his research at national and international conferences and meetings, including a Census Bureau Symposium, a meeting of the National Academies, and keynote addresses at Harvard and Brown Universities. Mr. Wagner's publications include Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York (2002); The Prison Index: Taking the Pulse of the Crime Control Industry (2003); and, with Eric Lotke, Prisoners of the Census: Electoral and Financial Consequences of Counting Prisoners Where They Go, Not Where They Come From, [PDF] 24 Pace L. Rev. 587 (2004).

Aleksandra Kajstura. Aleks edits the research database on the website and leads our school zone project. She is a student at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

Advisory Board*

  • Gillian Bearns, Robinson & Cole LLP
  • Andrew Beveridge, Sociology, Queens College
  • Nils Christie, Criminology, University of Oslo, Norway
  • Alec Ewald, Political Science, University of Vermont
  • Barbara Fedders, UNC School of Law
  • Joseph "Jazz" Hayden, plaintiff, Hayden v. Pataki
  • Daniel Jenkins, democracy activist, plaintiff, Longway v. Jefferson
  • Annette Johnson
  • Pamela S. Karlan, Stanford Law School
  • Eric Lotke, Research Director, Campaign for America's Future
  • David Pepyne, Senior Research Fellow, CASA Engineering Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst
  • Brigette Sarabi, Partnership for Safety and Justice
  • Angela Wessels
  • Brenda Wright, Demos: A Network for Ideas and Action
  • Rebecca Young, Attorney
  • Jon E. Yount, organizer of Mixon v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

*Organizations for identification purposes only.

The Prison Policy Initiative relies entirely on private funds and we need your support.
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