Prison Policy Initiative releases new briefing with notable coverage of prison transfers
The dynamics of prison transfers is a topic that I have not seen widely researched or discussed, even though I surmise transfers can have a significant impact on prison experiences. So I am pleased to see this notable new briefing from Iolanthe Brooks and the Prison Policy Initiative.
The title and subtitle provide an overview of the coverage and themes: “’You want to be in the hell you already know’: How prison transfers regularly upend incarcerated people’s lives; Moving people between prisons can improve their access to treatment, programs, and visitation — but transfers can also be deeply traumatizing, disruptive, and destabilizing. In this briefing, we use transfer records and interviews with dozens of formerly incarcerated New Yorkers to examine how often people are moved, why they’re moved, and how this little-discussed aspect of prison life impacts them.” Here is how the briefing begins:
Most people imagine incarceration as confinement in one place. Yet few incarcerated people serve their sentence in just one facility. Many are transferred repeatedly — sometimes dozens of times — before release.
Transfers require incarcerated people to pack their belongings, undergo invasive strip searches, and take long trips while restrictively shackled — what one person described as “the worst experience of my life.” When a transfer bus arrives, its passengers might find themselves closer to loved ones or at a prison hundreds of miles from them. Each move upends nearly every aspect of an incarcerated person’s life, including peer networks, familiarity with officers, institutional culture, rules, housing configurations (e.g., cells vs. dorms), and program and job opportunities.
In some cases, transfers are beneficial. They can move someone to a prison with a lower security classification, more programs, or a safer culture, as well as one closer to home. Such transfers can boost program access and visitation, both of which research has shown to contribute to well-being and reentry preparedness. In other cases, transfers can have the opposite effect, severing program participation and introducing a person to a stressful new environment. Regardless, transfers always bring changes. As one person told me, “Once you become acclimated to a prison… you know how to exist in that prison… But once you transfer, that no longer holds any thread to your daily living. You’ve got to start from scratch all over again. People hate that — it’s nerve-wracking.”
Despite their importance, transfers are a fact of prison life that few non-incarcerated people think about and that have received limited attention from policymakers and researchers. How often do transfers happen? Why do prisons transfer people? Most importantly, what impacts do transfers have for incarcerated people?
To answer these questions, I interviewed 52 New Yorkers who left prison in the last few years and created a novel quantitative dataset, generated by linking together administrative transfer records obtained by public records requests. Although I focus on New York, reporting suggests that transfers are similarly common and consequential in other state prison systems and in the Federal Bureau of Prisons.