Toward a Sociology of Inmate Networks

• In Event: Convict Criminology Session 6: Developing and Leveraging Human Capital Established While Incarcerated

Abstract

Over the past three decades, the steep rise in American imprisonment rates has motivated a spate of research focused on incarceration’s negative social consequences, including post-release employment and health, family ties and child development, and racial and community stratification and health inequality. Although informative, prior incarceration studies have generally neglected processes within prison systems. Prison culture and structure likely contribute to incarceration’s negative consequences, yet prison ethnographies withered just as imprisonment rates reached epidemic proportions. The informal social order and structural dynamics within modern prisons thus remain relatively unknown. In this presentation, we use network theory and methods to build a research agenda that returns the prison social system to the forefront of corrections research. After a brief overview of the network perspective, we demonstrate how a systems approach can test important hypotheses related to prison status hierarchies and social organization that are critical for improving prison-based rehabilitative efforts. We outline a networks-based data collection strategy that is both feasible and capable of providing novel and rich information. Finally, we discuss the advanced statistical tools available for network analyses and how these may help answer important theoretical hypotheses for inmate structure and relationship dynamics.

Authors

• Derek Kreager, Pennsylvania State University

• Martin Bouchard, Simon Fraser University

• Dana Haynie, Ohio State University

• David Schaefer, Arizona State University

• Sara Wakefield, Rutgers University

• Jacob Young, Arizona State University

• Gary Zajac, Pennsylvania State University