To count or not to count.

That’s not quite the question pondered and decided last week by the Legislative Reapportionment Commission — the panel of lawmakers working on the nuts and bolts of redrawing legislative districts in reaction to the new census numbers.

It isn’t about whether to count. It’s about where.

In this case, the people being counted are prisoners. The commission’s decision is to count prisoners not where they live at the time of the census — in state correctional institutions, for instance — but based on where they lived before they were in the state’s custody.

This will obviously benefit some of the state’s largest population centers. Philadelphia County admits more people to the state prison system than any other county, and that’s no surprise because Philadelphia has more people than any other county. Allegheny is a distant second. No other Southwestern Pennsylvania county cracks the top 10, according to U.S. Bureau of Justice numbers.

But rural counties, where these inmates actually live and breathe and use resources like water and health care, have small populations that can be decimated by moving 400 or 600 or 1,000 people off their books. Fayette County has one of the larger prison populations in the state. Numbers in Butler, Armstrong and Indiana counties have been on the rise.

In Fayette County, Luzerne Township is home to SCI-Fayette. The municipality’s population is 5,965. According to the state Department of Corrections, the prison’s population is 2,162. Cut the community’s numbers by a third when it comes to how they are represented by their lawmakers, and what will the impact on the people be? How will their leaders accurately advocate for the people — all of the people — who live there?

House Minority Leader Joanna McClinton, D-Philadelphia, said it makes no sense to count people in the places they have no community relationships or plans to remain. Does that mean that the rural counties can count the people who have life sentences and won’t be going home?

Community relationships don’t have bearing on representation. Where people actually live does.

“I know (prisoners are not there) by their choice, but they really are because they committed a crime, and they’ve been convicted of a crime,” said Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward, R-Hempfield. “They lost their right to choose where they live.”

Moving inmates on paper from their cells to their home communities makes no sense. They do not go to school there, need medical care there, breathe the air there or drink the water there. All of that happens where they live now, regardless of whether it is by choice. Just like college students can vote where they go to school, inmates should be counted where there bodies actually exist.

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