Charting the Hidden City: Collecting prison social network data

By Corey Whichard ,  David R. Schaefer , Derek A. Kreager 

   Penologists have long emphasized the importance of studying social relationships among prisoners to understand how people adapt to confinement. Imprisonment causes major shifts in one’s interpersonal relationships, as “imprisonment is a social experience that places offenders in a unique social domain that qualitatively restructures their lives” (Nagin, Cullen, and Jonson 2009:125). Exemplifying this line of thought, seminal studies of prison life from the mid-twentieth century focused on understanding the nature of inmate society, such as its function in mitigating the pains of imprisonment (Sykes 1958), the “prisonization” of new prisoners to the prison’s norms and codes (Clemmer 1940), and the extent to which prison culture is indigenous to the institution (Goffman 1961) versus a product of external forces imported into the prison context (Irwin and Cressey 1962; Jacobs 1977; for a review, see Kreager and Kruttschnitt 2018). Beyond understanding prison informal social order and its origins, several penological traditions clearly implicate social networks as an explanatory mechanism. For example, the “schools of crime” hypothesis proposes that incarceration intensifies criminality by allowing prisoners who are more deeply invested in criminal lifestyles to act as mentors to younger, less experienced peers (Clemmer 1940; Harris, Nakamura, and Bucklen 2018). Similarly, scholars have theorized that incarceration may impact health by exposing prisoners to a cramped social environment that facilitates the diffusion of illness and disease (Johnson and Raphael 2009; Massoglia 2008). In addition, solidarity among incarcerated individuals is believed to be causally related to prison order (DiIulio 1987; Skarbek 2014; Sykes 1958). Given this longstanding interest in prison interpersonal processes (social influence, contagion, cohesion, informal social control), it is surprising how rarely network methods have been applied in carceral contexts  

   Soc Networks. 2022 May ; 69: 170–179. doi:10.1016/j.socnet.2019.09.005.