Is It Who You Know in Prison That Counts? Exposure to Prison Gang Members and Criminal Careers

Incarceration exposes inmates to a range of offenders with a variety of skillsets. Whether connections made in prison have lasting consequences for criminal careers, or are simply relationships made “for the stay,” is at the heart of this study. We examine the potential consequences of prison ties of a specific kind: connections to prison gang members. We rely on unique social network data drawn from a subsample of male participants from the Incarcerated Serious and Violent Young Offender Study who formed a prison gang between 2000 and 2010. Using data on daily interactions of inmates as captured by correctional agents, we examine if being part of a youth prison gang has long-term consequences for criminal careers – not just for gang members, but also for a subsample of non-gang members embedded within the prison gang network. We find that non-gang youth who had a smaller social distance to gang members had longer criminal careers than non-gang youth who were further away from gang members. These non-gang youth even had longer criminal careers than youth prison gang members.