How Transient is Prison Life? An Examination of Transfers and Their Heterogeneity

Abstract

Prison scholarship suggests that individuals’ experiences during incarceration are diverse and contribute to the impacts of a prison sentence. This article seeks to advance this line of theory and research by shedding light on a specific aspect of prison life—prison facility transfers—that has theoretical linkages to social and behavioral outcomes, but has been largely overlooked in the incarceration literature. The specific aims of the article are twofold: First, the article provides an empirical examination of transfer heterogeneity by assessing the extent to which transfers vary in their prevalence, timing, and spatial impacts for a large state prisoner cohort consisting of more than 17,000 inmates who experienced more than 23,000 transfers over the course of their incarceration terms. Second, the article explores the relationships between theoretically relevant inmate characteristics and transfers. The analyses uncover the transient nature of prison life, that theoretically relevant group disparities exist in transfers, and that transfers cause or coincide with changes in prison experiences that likely affect behavior and individuals’ connections with outside social ties. The article has important implications for theory and research that can consider more closely how transfers and other potentially “mundane” aspects of prison life might have salient effects.

Keywords:

• incarceration
• prison transfers
• social ties
• inmate misconduct
• reentry

Acknowledgments

A version of this article was presented at the 2016 meeting of the Annual Society of Criminology in New Orleans, LA. I would like to thank William Bales for his help and guidance with the data. I would also like to thank Andrea Montes and Daniel Mears for serving as sounding boards, John Wooldredge, Ryan Shields, Elisa Toman, and Claudia Anderson for providing feedback on the paper, and Megan Kurlychek and three anonymous reviewers for their suggestions for improving the paper. Not least, I thank the Florida Department of Corrections (FDC) for providing the data. All views expressed here are those of the author only, not of the FDC.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Joshua C. Cochran, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati, School of Criminal Justice, P.O. Box 210389, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221, e-mail ([email protected]), phone [phone]). His research interests include criminological theory, punishment, and inequality. His work appears in criminology and criminal justice research journals and also in two recent books: Prisoner Reentry in the Era of Mass Incarceration (Sage) and The Fundamentals of Criminological and Criminal Justice Inquiry: The Science and Art of Conducting, Evaluating, and Using Research (Cambridge).

Notes

1 Only one known empirical study exists that examines transfer effects. Kigerl and Hamilton (2016) examined transfers and misconduct in Washington prisons. The study found that transferred inmates, in various circumstances, engaged in a higher rate of infractions after a transfer than they did before the transfer.

2 The “age” of these data is a potential limitation. However, there is no evidence in Florida’s administrative code that transfer policies have changed dramatically over time. Ideally, future studies can assess the robustness of these findings across place and time.

3 All inmates in Florida will first stay in an intake facility for the initial weeks of their imprisonment as they await transfer to a state prison. This movement was excluded from the data and is not being counted as a transfer.

4 Say, for example, that an inmate’s initial distance was 100 miles from home. They are then transferred and the inmate is now 150 miles from home. The “spatial impact” of that transfer is a 50-mile increase (150 – 100 = 50) in the distance score.

5 All of the analyses that appear in tables 2 and 3 were replicated using male- and female-specific subsamples. These ancillary analyses are available upon request.

6 Opportunities for within-person analyses will be especially appealing if there are scenarios in which inmates are moved for random reasons, such as occasional shuffling of inmates due to bed space constraints or administrative decisions, as opposed to when inmates are moved due to behavioral problems or changes in security level.

7 Prison inmate movement records present notorious comprehension challenges. But, these challenges can be overcome with careful study and proper collaboration between researchers and data experts with first-hand knowledge about the collection and organization of correctional and prison administrative records.