Current Research

When someone goes “to prison,” they rarely go to one place. Instead, incarcerated people are shuffled between prisons up to dozens of times over the course of a sentence. In this project, I use a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to understand why transfers happen, to whom, and how movement transforms the nature and experience of punishment. Specifically, I combine three data sources: 52 interviews with recently released New Yorkers; a novel dataset generated by linking three years of transfer records, obtained by 50+ FOIA requests; and content analysis of the prison rules governing transfers. Ultimately, transfers provide a window into everyday penal governance, with implications for theories of the state, punishment, and the political economy of mass incarceration. 

Publications

Brooks, Iolanthe. 2025. “How prison transfers regularly upend incarcerated people’s lives.” Prison Policy Initiative Briefing. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2025/06/05/prison_transfers/.

Brooks, Iolanthe. 2025. “‘Shipping Out’: Mapping the Prison Transfer Network.” Socius 11:23780231251330341. https://doi.org/10.1177/23780231251330341. (Open Access).

Brooks, Iolanthe, and Asha Best. 2021. “Prison Fixes and Flows: Carceral Mobilities and Their Critical Logistics.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 39(3):459–76. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0263775820984791.

An ID is often the most foundational prerequisite to employment, housing, a bank account, medical services, and a range of other resources. Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that a significant proportion of the 600,000-plus people returning from prison each year do so without valid identification. In the context of an already difficult reentry process, lacking identification can create additional barriers. Yet, little research examines the issue of identification during release. With principal investigators Lucius Couloute and Kayla Preito-Hodge, this mixed-methods study combines a national survey of Departments of Corrections, outcomes data from a natural experiment in identification access, and interviews with formerly incarcerated people to understand how identification access—and its lack—shapes reentry. This project is funded by Arnold Ventures. 

Criminologists have long found that family relationships are crucially important during reentry, while describing changing "people, places, and things" as central to desistance. Yet, little research examines the influence of social networks beyond family ties in reentry. In this mixed-methods study, I combine interviews, ethnography, and legal history to understand how parole officers, legal actors, and parolees understand the role of social networks in reentry. Altogether, the project explores how the relationships formerly incarcerated people come home to — as well as parole officer condition-setting, coaching, and supervision relating to them — influence reentry outcomes and stability.