Shuffling Within the System: The Pervasive Uncertainty of Prison Transfers

Abstract Prisons presumably represent paradigms of immobility and enclosure. Yet, going “to prison” means moving between a procession of facilities. Much like other state-funded institutions, from foster care to halfway houses, forced movement is a common part of incarceration. Building on literature about cross-institutional “people exchanges,” I use the case of prison transfers in New York State to argue that incarcerated people experience within-system shuffling as punitively uncertain, both at the scale of discrete transfers and in their accumulation. Drawing first on an original dataset of transfer records, I demonstrate that within-system shuffling is a pervasive aspect of prison management, with New York averaging one transfer per person incarcerated in 2022. In interviews with 52 formerly incarcerated people, many conceptualized transfers as flexible tools that administrators used to offload individuals whom they found difficult. Transfer experiences, however, went beyond such individual occurrences. As transfers accumulate across a sentence and in others’ moves, they destabilize incarcerated people’s relationships, with far-reaching implications for daily life, rehabilitation, and reentry. These findings demonstrate, first, the prevalence of within-system shuffling as an undertheorized aspect of state institutions; and second, how these administrative decisions reverberate and accumulate, deepening prison’s uncertainty.