Who Gets Shuffled Between Prisons?: Stratification in NY State Prison Transfers

• In Event: Sociology of Law Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Sociology of Law Section Roundtables: Table 6 — Punishment, Governance, and Social Control

Abstract

Incarceration is an engine of inequality—not only outside of prison walls, but within them. Indeed, past research demonstrates that “the” prison experience is far from monolithic, marked instead by disparities across race, age, gender, and sentence length, among other attributes. In this paper, we build on existing literature on stratification in prison experiences; to do so, we take a novel view of prisons not as static units but as dynamic systems characterized by the constant movement of people between facilities. These transfers between prisons are physically arduous and emotionally degrading for incarcerated people, and are generally common — New York state prisons, for example, transfer tens of thousands of people yearly. At the same time, aggregate transfer numbers obscure variation in who experiences this consequential process. Using a dataset constructed from four-plus years of administrative records — obtained from New York state prisons through public records requests — this paper asks: Who gets transferred? To address this question, we employ a Prentice-Williams-Peterson recurrent event survival analysis. We find that transfer likelihood varies significantly across race, age, sentence length, and time served. Altogether, these findings reveal transfers as an undertheorized mechanism of stratification in prison, with potential effects on incarcerated people’s long-term outcomes.

Authors

• Iolanthe Brooks, Northwestern University

• Kris Rosentel, Northwestern University