GARY, IND (WIBQ) - Gary Mayor Rudy Clay wants his city to be able to count Gary residents incarcerated outside of the northwestern Indiana city as Gary residents on the 2010 census.
Clay says he intends to ask state lawmakers to pass a bill that counts inmates according to their address prior to incarceration.
Indiana's more than 31,600 state and federal prison inmates are currently counted in the census as residents of the towns where they are incarcerated, not where they reside.
But Clay and some other municipal leaders want to change that, seeking to boost their official population numbers.
Some civil rights advocates and municipal leaders argue that the current way inmates are counted gives prison towns an unfair advantage in census counts.
