Skip to content
University of Maryland LibrariesDigital Repository at the University of Maryland
    • Login
    View Item 
    •   DRUM
    • Theses and Dissertations from UMD
    • UMD Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    •   DRUM
    • Theses and Dissertations from UMD
    • UMD Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Do Cellmates Matter? A Study of Prison Peer Effects under Essential Heterogeneity

    Thumbnail
    View/Open
    Harris_umd_0117E_15750.pdf (11.16Mb)
    No. of downloads: 860

    Date
    2014
    Author
    Harris, Heather Michele
    Advisor
    Reuter, Peter
    DRUM DOI
    https://doi.org/10.13016/M2931V
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Abstract
    This study examines prison peer effects in an adult prison population in the United States using a unique dataset assembled from the administrative databases of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. The members of a first-time prison release cohort were identified and matched to each of the cellmates with whom they shared a double cell. These data were then linked to arrest history data from the Pennsylvania State Police. Criminological theories of social influence expect unobserved and difficult to quantify factors, such as criminality, to affect criminal behavior both independently and through intermediate decisions, including the choice to maintain prison peer associations. Those theories, therefore, implicitly assume the presence of essential heterogeneity, which helps to account for the response heterogeneity observed in studies of social influence. This study introduces the concept of essential heterogeneity to criminology and is the first to apply a method to address it, local instrumental variables, to estimate causal social interaction effects. The analyses presented in this study demonstrate that there is considerable response heterogeneity in prison peer effects. That response heterogeneity is attributable to essential heterogeneity, as implicitly expected by criminological learning theories. However, the null average effects estimated do not accord with the predictions of criminological learning theories, including differential association, balance, and prisonization theories, each of which expects peers who are, on average, more criminally experienced to exert criminogenic effects. The presence of essential heterogeneity indicates that estimating average prison peer effects does little to adequately characterize the relationship between social interactions with cellmates and releasee reoffending behaviors. Within the null average prison peer effect estimates lies tremendous variation in marginal prison peer effects. Some marginal prison peer effects are significantly criminogenic, while others are significantly crimino-suppressive. That substantial variation in the measured effect of prison peers on reoffending persists despite rigorous analysis and the inclusion of robust theoretically relevant controls suggests that future work should focus on creating constructs more appropriate to the task of determining who is harmed and who is helped as a result of interactions with prison peers.
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/1903/16259
    Collections
    • Criminology & Criminal Justice Theses and Dissertations
    • UMD Theses and Dissertations

    DRUM is brought to you by the University of Maryland Libraries
    University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-7011 (301)314-1328.
    Please send us your comments.
    Web Accessibility
     

     

    Browse

    All of DRUMCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    My Account

    LoginRegister
    Pages
    About DRUMAbout Download Statistics

    DRUM is brought to you by the University of Maryland Libraries
    University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-7011 (301)314-1328.
    Please send us your comments.
    Web Accessibility