(Map: Wendy Sawyer, 2025)

This map originally appeared in “You want to be in the hell you already know”: How prison transfers regularly upend incarcerated people’s lives.

Over the course of a sentence, many incarcerated people are made to zig-zag between prisons across their state due to prison transfer practices. The above animation shows all transfers in New York State between 2021 and 2022, animated by week.