Prison fixes and flows: Carceral mobilities and their critical logistics

“Shipping out”

While prisons are often studied as isolated, singular sites, this paper approaches carceral geographies as networked circuits, viewed through the process of prison transfers. Every day, transfers shuffle thousands of people between police stations, jails, detention centers, and prisons (Follis, 2015; Hiemstra, 2013; Mountz and Hiemstra, 2014). Transfers between sites are a critical part of the mundane circuitry upon which the carceral state depends—one that fosters encounter, along with isolation and immobility (Gilmore, 2007). At times, this circuitry is brought into sharp relief. In 2015, for example, Freddie Gray died while being transported in a police van. His injuries, and others like them, were said to be the result of a “rough ride.” In 2019, as U.S. migrant detention camps once again came under widespread scrutiny, images of branded “baby buses” outfitted with car seats came to represent an eerie potential: technology for transporting and deporting children. Rather than seeing these as a constellation of isolated incidents, we understand them to be closely related and part of a broader network that stretches from border regions to urban streetscapes. We see them as held together by a carceral logic of efficient and constant movement. These examples constitute moments of slowdown and spectacular violence amongst the mundane and ongoing traffic of people who are incarcerated and detained. However, while these particular moments place transfers (and their delays) into the public imagination, a majority of transfers do not figure into how carceral sites are typically rhetorically constructed or read. Transfers are usually far from spectacular and, instead, are built into the literal and ideological infrastructures of the prison system. It is these mundane movements that we are interested in. Approaching this study of the carceral through movement, rather than fixity and stasis, we argue that transfers between sites of containment are a key component of the circuitry that makes the carceral state possible. In this article, we examine the function of prison transfers (primarily between facilities, but also to and from court), demonstrating how the everyday traffic of incarcerated people offers an important perspective through which to understand the carceral system and its logics of efficiency, enumeration, and risk. We begin with an analysis of the transfer system as a circulatory process that coordinates the controlled movement of bodies, contending that transfers constitute a system of logistics, rooted in efficiency and flow. We consider the rise of transfer logistics, along with its present calculative orientation, lived experience and speeds, and potential future geographies. In doing so, we situate how transfers function as a “fix” that allows for the reproduction of the carceral state (Gilmore, 2007).

This writing emerged from a preliminary study conducted from May 2018 to October 2019 which focused on the lived experience of prison transfers. The pilot study involved semi-structured interviews with 13 formerly incarcerated people with a wide range of experiences, having been imprisoned in six states, the majority in New York, for sentences as short as eight months and as long as 33 years. ¹ These interviews served as an entry into this project, orienting us toward New York as a primary locus, and yielding a number of research questions and pathways, including how transfers are intended to function and how they complicate commonplace notions of carcerality. As we combed through the stories that were shared in the preliminary study, we became increasingly interested in how circulating people throughout various carceral sites, and in particular transfers between prisons, make prisons viable. In this paper, in addition to semi-structured interviews, we draw on transfer records, administrative records, and public documents obtained from the Department of Corrections and New York State. This archive of state records provides a window into how transfers shape the architecture of the carceral system. While our interviews illustrate how the imaginaries outlined in transfer policies intersect and contrast with the lived realities of transfers, the collection of state records serves to document the construction of a transfer infrastructure, allowing us to trace the rise of transfer logistics alongside the prison boom.

Our project draws from several bodies of scholarly work. Carceral geographies have challenged notions of the prison as immobilizing, instead drawing attention to their uneven geographies of banishment and encounter (see Brown, 2014; Gill et al., 2018; Gilmore, 2007; Loyd et al., 2009; Martin and Mitchelson, 2009; Moran, 2012, 2015; Stoller, 2003). Similarly, critical mobilities scholars have crafted a language to theorize from spaces of movement (see Cresswell, 2010, 2012; Sheller and Urry, 2006), and critical logistics scholars have demonstrated how the technocratic language and infrastructures of global supply chains have shifted “the very rationality by which space is organized” (Chua et al., 2018: 617). Following Chua et al.’s (2018) call for a capacious definition of logistics, we bring these literatures together to draw attention to the importance of movement in the study of prisons.

Logistics systems calibrate time and space to move goods from producers to consumers. In its approach and application, logistical supply chain management has drastically reshaped geographies of production, consumption, travel, and transport. Logistics has a long history rooted in the trans-Atlantic slave trade (Harney and Moten, 2013) and imperial warfare (Cowen, 2014), which both sought to ensure the fluid movement of people and goods across vast and contested spaces. As new work in critical logistics exemplifies, these globalizing supply chains rework borders and solidify regimes of power, imperialism, and racial capitalism. Logistics are ideological, technological, and physical systems comprised of multiple infrastructures as well as technologies of sorting, routing, and shipping. In its imagination and production of space, logistics “[suture] a form of calculative reason premised on system-wide optimization to the reconfiguration of physical and social landscapes” (Chua et al., 2018: 621). Its multiscalar configurations arrange labor (Cowen, 2010; Danyluk, 2018; Loewen, 2018), transport technologies (Campling and Colás, 2018; Lin, 2018; Orenstein, 2018), legal systems (Chalfin, 2006; Cowen, 2010), and consumption—ensuring that stuff can be produced, moved, and consumed with little friction, meeting “just-in-time” and on-demand expectations. In doing so, logistical systems rework global life, constructing borders that increase the flow of goods while stifling human migration, facilitating the movement of underpaid labor, and organizing places around the acts of shipping and selling. In this way, logistics has wide political ramifications.

Considering supply chains shifts our focus beyond individual sites of production, distribution, and consumption to the flows that connect these spaces. This shift is exemplified in the move from “the warehouse” to the “distribution center,” a rebranding that reflects “the shift in its purpose in the context of just-in-time production from storing inventory to sorting and redistributing commodities. The distribution center keeps stuff in motion” (Cowen, 2014: 111). In the same way, examining the carceral state through movement shifts our perspective from the warehousing of people to the prison’s necessary mobilities. Doing so “implies that the site is never simply local or entirely contained” (Cowen, 2014: 18); the prison is fundamentally networked. Though its positioning in public consciousness emphasizes discrete sites, we find that the American carceral landscape is comprised of as many interfaces as separations. This is particularly evident in Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s mappings of carceral space between rural California, South Central Los Angeles, and the state capitol (Gilmore, 2007). Scholars of critical logistics have examined supply chains between sites and through their material spaces (Cowen, 2014; Hepworth, 2014; Lin, 2018; Ziadah, 2018). It is this approach that we cultivate here, theorizing from the transfer bus and the process of movement between prisons.

Using logistics as a lens, we first turn to the prison boom of the 1990s and rise of transfer logistics as a “fix” for the manufactured crises of underfilling and overcrowding. We then consider the present transfer system’s calculative approach to categorizing transfers and risk. We pause to trouble the notion of fluid movements within the transfer system, highlighting their many stoppages along with the rootedness of the people they move. Finally, we turn to the alternative carceral geographies currently being proffered, finding continuity between “old” carceral logistics and “new” ones.

Logistical worlding

In the 1970s, each New York State prison was responsible for transferring the people it incarcerated, forming a patchwork, decentralized system. Following a study by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1974, New York centralized its transfer system and established a basic set of governing policies. A decade later, in the period between 1980 and 1990, the number of incarcerated people transferred between prisons had tripled according to a 1991 audit of the New York Department of Corrections’ transfer system. Given that the transportation infrastructure supporting prison transfers had not undergone significant updates during this time, this swell in movements cannot be attributed to shifts in the method or structure of transfers or to new technologies. Instead, the rise in prison transfers reflects the availability of beds in newly built prisons and the expanding prison population (Haag et al., 1991). In this period of rapid expansion, a different kind of logistical infrastructure began to coalesce: one that was able to accommodate the movements and flows shaping the growing carceral state as efficiently as possible. In this section, we trace how the prison boom of the 1980s and 1990s shaped this new logistical infrastructure for transfers. We argue that, at the very moment when rates of incarceration were tripling (The Sentencing Project, 2019), the coordinated movement of people as “carceral objects” (Gilmore, 2007: 130) between prisons allowed the system to persist.

Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison was built in the United States every ten days (Stevenson, 2015). Ruth Gilmore’s study of prison expansion in California provides an important framework for understanding this rapid construction, illustrating how prisons provided “geographical solutions to political economic crises” (Gilmore, 2007: 26). Deindustrialization and economic crises in the 1970s and 1980s created a surplus of idled labor, as work in the industrial sector diminished. Moreover, the overlapping ecological crises of the 1970s—especially drought—along with growing municipal debt created a land surplus, as places that relied on agricultural production struggled with inoperable land and unemployed farmworkers. A ballooning incarcerated population meant the building of new prisons, predominantly in small towns. This prison expansion linked urban and rural landscapes through both real and imagined crises, promising viability to localities struggling with structural divestment and abandonment. The rise in prison populations, in turn, was made possible by legal, political, and enforcement-related “innovations,” including the institution of mandatory minimums (Schlesinger, 2011); Rockefeller and parallel drug legislation; the hyper-criminalization of crack cocaine and substance use (Alexander, 2012); and “truth-in-sentencing” and “three strikes” legislations (James, 2017). These “innovations” worked to translocate modestly undereducated people in the prime of their life, disproportionately young men of color from urban areas, to rural land. Gilmore’s work shows the linkages between these events—crisis, a rising prison population, and new prison development—through the frame of “fixes.” She argues that the state attempts to resolve perpetual crisis through two trajectories—reformist remedies for exclusion or by deepening and formalizing inequality (Gilmore, 2002). Disproportionately expanding the incarceration of people of color of modest means and translocating people from urban centers to new rural facilities during the prison boom is an example of the latter trajectory, a project of racial state-building. Put otherwise, prisons and those they incarcerate became a “fix” by the state for the intersecting crises of “surplus land, capital, labor and state capacity” (Gilmore, 2007: 28).

Following Gilmore, Morrell (2012) illustrates how the dynamics that culminated in California’s prison boom related to New York State’s prison expansion. Morrell attributes the emergence of prison towns in upstate and western New York to the intersection of abandonment and carceral expansion. Tripling rates of incarceration between the 1980s and early 2000s coincided with a loss of manufacturing jobs and a statewide fiscal crisis. As in California, New York’s rural towns welcomed prisons as state investments in their economic development—that is, as a fix. During this period of rapid expansion, when small towns celebrated new facilities, the ability to move incarcerated populations between an expanding constellation of prison sites was important to keeping New York’s prison system viable. People were transported into new prisons as they entered the system, and new facilities were filled through transfers from other prisons. For existing prisons, transfers ensured that they were kept near capacity (Haag et al., 1991).

In its operating policy, per the 1991 audit of the New York transfer system, transfers were meant to follow a standard practice wherein incarcerated people begin at their highest-assigned security level and are transferred to prisons with lower security designations over the course of their sentence. “Down-classifying,” or graduated classification, reflects the discourse and logic of prison reform and rehabilitation (Haag et al., 1991: 5), which had been used to justify prisons’ existence and expansion before 1977 (Bookspan, 1991). With “down-classifying” as popular practice, the exigencies of the rapidly expanding prison industry also created new imperatives around the movement of incarcerated populations. The 1991 audit contains a transfer flow map that shows how incarcerated people from New York City, who comprise the majority of people incarcerated across the state, were to move to prisons upstate and/or in the western part of the state as standard practice, before being transferred back downstate as they near their release (see Haag et al., 1991: 5). As such flow maps attest to, the growth of prisons required a complex choreography of movements from downstate to upstate (in the case of New York)—a solution that emerged out of the policy of down-classifying, that, in practice, worked to mitigate the problem of overcrowding and keep this burgeoning network of facilities at or near capacity (Haag et al., 1991). Tremendous investment was made in the circulation of the prison population: during 1989–1990 alone, there were 101,450 transfers made at an estimated cost of US$3.2 million. The new imperative of prison transfers, namely “servicing” newly developed prison facilities and expanding the capacity to warehouse more people, undermined the reformist narratives that had informed the policy of down-classifying. The 1991 auditing committee concluded: “Inmate moves are primarily intended to meet the system’s, not the inmates’ needs,” and these needs, first and foremost, were to “attempt to fill every bed every day” (Haag et al., 1991: 6).

The 1991 audit prioritizes efficiency, service, and more seamless coordination—in short, a turn toward prioritizing logistics. Given that the primary goal of the auditing body was to increase the efficiency and efficacy of state program delivery, it is not remarkable that the report’s central finding is that “inefficiencies exist in the [transfer] system, and that there is potential for achieving greater economies in inmate movement” (Haag et al., 1991: 1). Attending to efficiency, however, demonstrates how logistical techniques became a dominant approach to organizing and controlling incarcerated populations during this period. The audit’s recommendations included implementing a movement database, along with a more robust system for assessing risk in order to better identify people who could be moved. Greater attention to cost-control measures, such as reducing transfers that do not follow the graduated classification system (including moves for “good behavior” or “closer to home” moves) and the utilization of “hub facilities,” also became part of the recommended strategy for greater efficiency. These suggestions reflect logistical thinking, which is focused on monitoring flow, taking a calculative approach to determining (in)efficient movement, and producing a network-based system (with “hubs” and offshoots). These suggestions, as we will discuss, became realities, as the transfer system developed to the present day.

Transfer logistics

The archive of New York’s 1991 audit of the transfer system reveals a transformation, from a decentralized system using reformist ideals of graduated classification, into sites of centralization, technocracy, and the imperative of maintaining a growing carceral network through constant human flow. Since the 1990s, the logistics of the transfer system have solidified into a centralized administrative infrastructure focused on classification and calculation. Currently, transfers flow from multiple administrative channels reflecting a classification of needs and interests—from medical emergencies to security designation—that exemplify the carceral system’s logic of numeration. As we outline below, this carceral and logistical logic serves to translate the needs and actions of incarcerated people into classifications that are then managed (e.g. a code indicating the cause for transfer or a disciplinary violation Tier). It emerges from a reformist ideology that increased use of classification would increase benevolent penal outcomes for “lower level” or “lower risk” crimes/people, as demonstrated through the evolution of disciplinary classification systems and the ways in which they are intertwined with the transfer system. While initially a reformist policy, the uptake of this classificatory logic relied on an interest in financial efficiency.

The administrative system for transfers is reflected in the “Handbook for the Families and Friends of New York State DOCCS Offenders,” published by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) in hardcopy and online. The Handbook was designed to help family members and friends of those incarcerated “understand more about the New York State correctional system” (Annucci and Cuomo, 2015: 3). It offers an illuminating public-facing overview of how to navigate the prison bureaucracy from locating an incarcerated loved one and sending packages to commissary, misconduct, and reentry. The section on transfers lists only the address for the Office of Classification and Movement, which oversees the transfer system and coordinates each move; however, transfers are discussed under other topical headings. Throughout the text, several causes of transfers are cited, including: for a court appointment (p. 5); to a hospital for an urgent medical need (p. 5); to a prison with medical facilities for long-term care, in the case of chronic and terminal illness (p. 32); as a result of a request from someone incarcerated (p. 37); due to the disciplinary infraction process (p. 27); and finally, cases where they are simply “unscheduled” (p. 5). Potential transfers are submitted by facility staff to the central office, where they are coded and routed according to their justification. In response to a public records request by the authors (dated 10/21/2019), DOCCS released their list of transfer approval codes. The 88 total codes include “unsuitable” by program, behavior, medical, and more; “industries” (presumably, a transfer for a job placement); “for reclassification” (for up- or down-classification); and “distribution of population” (to balance the number of people incarcerated between prisons).

This litany of reasons for transfer is a product of the unpredictability of holding thousands of people in cages. The administrative transfer system responds to this uncertainty with logistical classification—the first of which is defining the cause of transfer. The codes that indicate different routes to a transfer illuminate how transfers are entangled with many other processes of the prison system. They work as a fix to balance the number of people within the carceral network, to avoid chokepoints and minimize empty beds, and to keep people alive through medical transfers. Transfers also support ongoing processes in the criminal-legal system, as in the case of transfers to courts. The transfer system classifies needs, interests, and causes for both its internal analysis and its outward-facing documentation.

This classificatory approach also informs the relationship between prison discipline and transfers, an example that is demonstrative of the ideology driving the approach. The causal links between (a) the classification of people and prisons by security level, (b) disciplinary processes that shape risk assessments, and (c) respondent movements between prisons reflects an actuarial logic that pervades logistics systems. From the state protection of critical infrastructure being construed as a national security measure to algorithmic systems management, logistics has a “calculative orientation to physical movement … applying technologies of quantification, modeling, and computation to the circulatory processes of material objects” (Chua et al., 2018: 621). The technologies that propel logistics systems are described with the languages of science, rationality, and calculation that can belie their constructed forms. In particular, using logistical technologies to forecast future risk rationalizes present securitization, state intervention, and surveillance in order to protect circulation (Chua et al., 2016; Cowen, 2010, 2014; Khalili, 2017; Pasternak and Dafnos, 2018). We find resonances between the calibration of risk in logistics and prison transfers. In logistics, risk is a mode of thinking about critical infrastructure and supply chains, and risk management is “the technique for implementing this knowledge” to minimize disruption, friction, or disturbance (Pasternak and Dafnos, 2018: 741). In the criminal-legal system, risk relies on predictive algorithms that translate discrete pieces of information into scores and classifications, which profoundly shape both how people move through the criminal-legal process ² and between prisons (Harcourt, 2015; Monahan and Skeem, 2014).

Necessary to understanding how transfers interplay with risk assessments is a discussion of the historical lineage of penal classifications in the United States. In a history of the California prison system from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, Bookspan (1991: 116) describes the reformist movement toward classification and stratified prison facilities: by the 1950s, California had moved from a singular, non-classified prison to a system of minimum, medium, and maximum prisons that sought to “separate prisoners from each other and to classify them according to their predicted ability to return to society as functioning citizens” (emphasis added; Bookspan, 1991: 116). By the late 1970s, California and the Federal Bureau of Prisons had adopted what are called in the field of risk-needs assessments and predictive risk assessments, “objective” classification systems (Sun, 2012). Following California’s lead, these assessments became widespread across state prison systems during the 1980s (Austin et al., 2001; Sun, 2012). In order to generate a composite number or classification, objective classification systems use “scoring forms that evaluate the offender’s current offense(s), prior criminal record and history, and other background attributes” (Sun, 2012: 27). The composite score output determines the security level of the facility a person is sent to, amongst other things (Austin, 2003). These classification systems are “largely interested in identifying those prisoners who pose a risk to escape, or will be potential management problems,” as described in the Department of Justice briefing (Austin, 2003).

In Bookspan’s history, classification systems are shown to have originated in the 1800s as part of an ideology of penal reform and an interest in parole, thought to be a benevolent alternative to prison. In their history of risk assessments in the criminal-legal system, Monahan and Skeem (2014) note that classification saw a resurgence and increased algorithmic complexity in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Amidst the prison boom, states turned to classification systems to release the fiscal pressure of rising prison populations; for example, by “objectively” down-classifying security levels, as maximum security facilities cost more than their minimum counterparts (United States Department of Justice Federal Prison System, 2019: 2). Or, as Monahan and Skeem (2014: 2) make the point: “What explains the sudden return of risk to a place of penological prominence? Money appears to be the principal answer.” This is echoed in the 1991 audit, which suggested more robust risk assessments as an opportunity save money in the transfer system. Classification, as both a reformist and fiscal tool, aimed to increase the financial efficiency of the prison system while reducing the risk of escape or misconduct.

Risk classification is interwoven with the transfer system. According to several participants, transfers often came as the result of disciplinary action. This is reiterated in the Family Handbook (Annucci and Cuomo, 2015: 27):

When a violation of a rule has occurred, the offender will be issued a misbehavior report. These misbehavior reports are classified into three categories: Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 … The more severe instances of offender misbehavior may result in the offender being transferred to a more restrictive living condition. ³

Those interviewed detailed the complex administrative infrastructure of transfers as operating through this language of calculation. When Mia, for example, felt threatened by transphobic violence and threats, she obtained a weapon. When it was found by correctional staff during a shakedown, she was issued a disciplinary charge, which increased her security designation and triggered a transfer. The disciplinary and transfer process, in its routine functioning, rendered her action of having a weapon into a discrete, calculable instance with a numeric signifier (e.g. Tier II). It tied a classification of her actions to a classification of her “riskiness,” linked to her movement between facilities. Mia’s experience demonstrates how security scores and their amendment after an infraction render people in prison “extracts from the actuarial and statistical record, gaining relevance as bundles of favorable characteristics and cross-sections of risk scores” (Follis, 2015: 948).

In her explanation of a different transfer experience, Mia described how infractions have a life that seems distinct from the human faces of the prison system:

Let’s say you’re an officer and you write me up for insubordination, which is talking back to an officer … they file a DR [disciplinary report] on you … and they run it through the computer. The computer actually raises your status from medium to close ⁴ [security] … . They don’t have no control over that anymore.

Transfers are the afterlife of a system of assessment and calculation that transforms complex actions into scores or tiers. Disciplinary violations, for example, are transfigured into classifications, which reduce incarcerated people and their actions to scores that can be moved and managed. Both in the transfer system’s classification of causes for transfer and in its coordination of disciplinary infractions that lead to transfer, we draw connections between the reformist and logistical ideologies of classification/computation and the choreography of carceral movements via transfer. As suggested in the critical logistics literature, we find that calculation emerges from an interest in reform, efficiency, and penal management and that it functions to distance these carceral flows from responsibility and critique.

Transfers as lived: Motility, speed, and chaotic geographies

As logistical imaginaries posit a world of motility, where goods move frictionlessly, carceral logics construct those who are transferred as easily moved. Transfers are frequent in prison and create constant flows of people. While we argue that, from the scale of the logistical, transfers are strategic decisions made to prioritize efficiency and flow, on the scale of an individual person’s route through various prisons, transfers bring chaos and confusion, friction, and plenty of human error. Put otherwise, the neatly logical transfer ideal does not match how people who are transferred conceptualize or experience transfers (that is, as chaotic and disorienting); and, by rendering those transferred motile, transfers disrupt the fragile worlds that people in prison work to construct. In this section, we briefly outline a few divergences between transfers’ logistical imaginary and lived reality. In so doing, we draw upon the reflections of a cross-section of participants on why transfers occur, their length/speed, and their effect on world-making.

Transfer speeds and stoppages

“Globalized ‘just-in-time’ (JIT) production systems require speed” in production, to move through critical ports, and for goods to be sorted and sold (Cowen, 2010: 601). As Bernes (2013, online) notes, “speed alone is insufficient. Timing is crucial.” Logistical imaginaries seek to produce reliability and smooth flow “to ensure the uninterrupted circulation of value” (Danyluk, 2018: 637). Bernes (2013, online) compares the reliable, frictionless, and fast movement of goods in a logistical ideal to “the purest and most liquid of forms capital takes: money.” Yet, alongside speed, critical logistics is attuned to friction: blockades, strikes, miscommunications, and mishaps (Bernes, 2013; Chua, 2014; Zeiderman, 2019). A material critique of logistics, especially of the labor and people who produce supply chains (Chua, 2015; Kanngieser, 2013; Loewen, 2018), finds that the frictionless flows of capital depicted in global supply maps obscure the many stoppages—both explicit and infrapolitical—that pervade logistics at all scales.

Transfers similarly have an idealized uninhibited flow and a reality of stoppages, waiting, and chokepoints, inviting critique from both the state’s vision of transfers and the lived experience of how they actually take place—that is, of logistical worlds and logistical imaginaries. In administrative documents and maps of transfers, the rhetorical image of the system is one of seamless and fluid movements. People are categorized within a number of transfer classifications, marked in a series of administrative documents and then “shipped out” to be moved from facility to facility.

However, this summary obscures the reality of transfers as slow, difficult, and chaotic. Those transferred are cut off from temporal markers. Without access to official measures, people use alternative time tools (such as the sunrise, radio presenters, or sunset) to create vague transfer timelines (Figure 1). In our conversations, participants recounted five, eight, ten, and twelve-plus hour bus rides. Many transfers are spent without food, on unpadded seats, without bathrooms, and next to strangers. These trips sometimes include picking up or dropping off passengers, or layovers at different facilities, which result in indirect and prolonged routes. In addition to driving time, before leaving a facility, people are put into what participants referred to as a “holding pen,” where they wait to be security checked and processed out. Similarly, after arriving, people wait to be security checked and processed into the new facility. Alongside this “regular” lack of speed and the discomfort it brings with it, participants told stories of hours-long waits while correctional staff ate at roadside restaurants, contended with traffic, were misdirected, and more.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Generalized and estimated transfer timeline, as described by participants.

Simply put, transfers expand to fill days of people’s lives and effectively cut those transferred off from standard measures of time. While transfers are presented as efficient and smooth from the logistical perspective of policymakers, they are replete with stoppages in how they actually unfold.

“Jails kill people. Reformed jails kill people” ⁷ : Prison’s logistical future

In this article, we have considered the rise of transfer logistics—a coordinated, calculative system designed to nimbly respond to the unpredictable crises of prisons (such as overcrowding or medical emergencies) by moving people between facilities. In its creation, as charted through a 1991 audit of the system, the transfer administration prioritized logistical ideals: efficiency, distribution, and flow. The system functions through classification and enumeration into causes for transfer, and through the disciplinary process’ use of risk assessments to inform transfers. In these ways, the transfer system functions through the framework of logistics to keep prisons working in the face of challenges. While on a policy level, the transfer system operates neatly with logical flows, our participants relayed a very different lived experience of transfers, as chaotic and temporally disorienting. The causes for transfers were often unclear to those moved and their process replete with stoppages. Finally, the transfer system views incarcerated people as moveable; in reality, people work to build emotional and material worlds to which they are tethered and which are disrupted by sudden transfers. In this way, the lived experience of the transfer system diverges from its logistical imaginaries and both illuminate how transfers work to keep prisons viable rather than in the needs/interests of those moved.

At present, mass incarceration and criminal justice reform have received renewed attention, and alternative approaches to carceral mobilities have come to the fore. In New York City, under the leadership of Mayor Bill de Blasio, for example, coalitions are seeking to shift logistical transfer management toward decentralization. The vision and ideologies that this coalition proffers suggest that transfer logistics and carceral mobilities are evolving, and the organizing of abolitionists against this vision offers an alternative future for transfers, prisons, and community safety.

In 2016, following years of community organizing and the death of Kalief Browder, de Blasio announced that he would move to close Rikers Island and build what he describes as a new and radical vision for the New York City jail system: Justice Hubs (City of New York, 2019). In October 2019, the New York City Council approved an eight-billion-dollar plan to build four of these Hubs, forming a network of borough-based jail facilities. The coalition advocating for the closing of Rikers has critiqued the prevailing logistical tenet it represents—clustered facilities—through a reframed logistical analysis of decentralization. Rikers Island is a complex of jails, with the catchment zone of the entire city. This geography emerges from the thinking that it is more efficient to transport people between nearby facilities as beds fill or security designations change. The 1991 audit, for example, encouraged the use of hub facilities to increase the efficiencies of transfers. This recommendation is reflected in the geography of the New York prison system, which contains clusters of prisons, often with differing security levels or specifications. ⁸ These clusters are divided into regions of the state, called hubs. ⁹

Whereas the clustered-facility model is based on the understanding that it is cheaper to move people between nearby facilities, the decentralized model argues that the movement costs in and out of these clusters are less efficient than having dispersed facilities closer to the point of origin of those entering the system. It is this latter understanding that justifies the Justice Hubs. “[T]he most important step” to developing a plan for the Justice Hubs, writes Maurice Chammah (2019, online), “would be finding the right locations,” as around 10% of those held at Rikers are transferred off the island (and out of the jail-cluster) to court each day. “The trips take hours to complete and cost thirty-one million dollars a year” (Chammah, 2019, online). Due to the temporal cost of transportation in and out of the jail cluster, advocates have argued that Rikers’ remote location makes visiting the island difficult for loved ones, lawyers, and service providers as well as expensive for the state (deVuono-powell et al., 2015). Justice Hubs have been advocated for using a critique of the logistical necessity to consolidate and cluster. As an alternative to the old script, the city has argued for its inverse: from centralized prison hubs to decentralized Justice Hubs.

While Justice Hubs may appear starkly different from Rikers, this vision in fact mobilizes a familiar logistical argument of efficiency as a primary framework for the design and placement of carceral sites. The city argues that Justice Hubs would use funds more efficiently than Rikers while reforming the jail system (Gallagher et al., 2017: 27). In one of their reports, the commission that spearheaded the Justice Hub model (2017) argues that Hubs’ decentralized location will make each of the following more efficient: the court process, transportation to court, legal representation (e.g., more efficient lawyer visits), service delivery, family visitation, and commute times for correctional officers. In short, the reformers advocating for Justice Hubs have pursued a model that would allow jails to work better by, in part, reimagining their transfer logistics; they have reworked an old script to meet ends that are similar to previous prison expansions.

In response to the older prison hub model and the newer Justice Hubs model, other coalitions of activists have advocated for an alternative vision based on dismantling the racial carceral state. Abolitionist groups, calling upon the deep tradition of Black liberation work, have mobilized to pressure community boards to vote against the Justice Hub jail expansion plan. The No New Jails coalition has been a leader in the movement to shut down Rikers without the building of Justice Hubs. In 2019, they released a capacious Abolition Plan, extending from New York Police Department (NYPD) budget cuts and bail reform to the expansion of public housing and free and accessible education (No New Jails Coalition, 2019). The plan advocates for an abolitionist model of community accountability in the face of harm; it is “less about the absence of prisons and jails, and much more about the presence of everything we need in order to thrive and build a society that does not rely on our imprisonment and premature death” (No New Jails Coalition, 2019: 3). In this way, abolitionist organizers do not propose to fill the space of the carceral state with an alternative to prisons, but instead to build a future without it. No New Jail’s vision exemplifies how abolitionist imaginaries unthink the logistical frame of efficiency, which drives the Justice Hubs, and look toward liberatory futures.

The old logistics of carceral geographies and mobilities may be shifting toward reworked scripts—reforms that are disrupting the geography of prisons without unearthing their logistical frames. While centralization minimizes movement between facilities, and this new vision of Justice Hubs minimizes movement to and from facilities, both understand transfers as problems that can be solved through updated efficiencies. We find, however, that transfers are not the crux of the “problem,” whether in a Justice Hub or prison hub. Instead, transfers are logistical tools—compelled by calculations of risk, imagined motile subjects, and systems of classification—that work as a fix for the prison system, allowing it to persist. This analysis makes clear that the issue is not whether there should be more or fewer transfers or whether prisons should be clustered or decentralized, but instead the persistence of the carceral state and its attendant logics and logistics.