Miles and bars between: quasi-carceral liminality and tertiary prisonization of prison visitation transportation services

Abstract

Prison visitation transportation services provide an important yet understudied role in the process of prison visitation for many people with incarcerated loved ones. This project draws from the findings of an ethnographic study on the experiences of loved ones of incarcerated people using a small, Black-owned prison visitation transportation service. As the first study of its kind focused on the experiences of prison visitation transportation services, this project highlights the important role these services play in the lives of those who use them, and how these services are shaped by their relationship to the carceral state. Prison visitation transportation services help to mitigate carceral control over the lives of those who use these services to visit their incarcerated loved ones, but in turn these services are also subjected to an intensive form of carceral control themselves, extending the reach of the carceral state further into the lives of their customers. Caught between mitigating the harms of incarceration for loved ones on the outside and being forced to comply with the carceral state’s control of visitors, prison visitation transportation services assume a “peculiar status” of quasi-carceral liminal spaces. Subjected to rigid forms of carceral control themselves, prison visitation transportation services and their staff experience a form of tertiary prisonization. This ultimately results in the drivers of these services experiencing a heightened and enduring state of layered liminality, which becomes attached to them as individuals.