Prison, Peers, and Recidivism: Does Severity Matter?

One of my recent research ideas combines the identification strategy of Bayer, Hjalmarsson, and Pozen (2009) with the random peer assignment design in Lyle (2007). Bayer, Hjalmarsson, and Pozen show that exposure to peers who committed specific crimes increases a juvenile’s likelihood of committing those same crimes after release. I sought to extend their work by testing whether the severity of peers’ crimes further amplifies these effects.

I ultimately set the idea aside, but the identification strategy relied on peer exposure being independent of the individual prisoner, similar to how cadets are randomly assigned to social groups at West Point. Peer composition is driven by the crimes and judicial processes of others and would only fail to be independent if someone committed crimes with others who were later incarcerated in the same facility.

While Bayer, Hjalmarsson, and Pozen (2009) focus on knowledge transfer for specific crimes, peers may also influence broader outcomes by shaping salience, norms, and attitudes. This design would test whether exposure to peers with more severe convictions, measured by sentence length and felony class, increases the likelihood that ex-convicts escalate into more serious crimes than their prior offenses.

The full (resting) paper is available here. Unfortunately, I stopped the project before reaching any results.