June, Tuesday 18th 2024

Laura Khoury (Paris Dauphine-PSL) will present “Peer effects in prison”, joint with Julian Johnsen (University of Bergen).

Abstract:

Peer interactions likely play an especially important role in the criminal sector due to its secretive nature and lack of formal institutions. Crucially, a large part of criminal peer exposure happens in prison, and is thus directly under the influence of policy makers and prison administrators.
This paper provides a more comprehensive understanding of how peer effects shape criminal behavior among prison inmates, focusing on how co-inmates influence recidivism and the formation of criminal networks post-incarceration. Our research design causally identifies peer effects in prison using rich Norwegian register data on over 140,000 prison spells and leveraging within-prison facility variation in peers over time. Our analysis reveals several novel findings. First, exposure to more experienced co-inmates increases recidivism. Second, exposure to ``top criminals'' (i.e. those with extreme levels of criminal experience) plays a distinctive role in shaping these recidivism patterns. Third, we provide novel documentation of criminal network formation among prison co-inmates, which could serve as a critical mechanism through which peer influences operate within prisons. Fourth, our results underscore the role of homophily in accentuating these peer and network effects. Together, these findings not only contribute to the theoretical understanding of peer influences in criminal activities but also offer practical insights for policy-makers aiming to reduce recidivism through strategic inmate grouping and prison management policies.