TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bayer,Patrick
AU  - Hjalmarsson,Randi
AU  - Pozen,David
TI  - Building Criminal Capital behind Bars: Peer Effects in Juvenile Corrections
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12932
PY  - 2007
Y2  - February 2007
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12932
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12932.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Patrick Bayer
Department of Economics
Duke University
213 Social Sciences
Durham, NC 27708
Tel: 919/660-1832
E-Mail: patrick.bayer@duke.edu

Randi Hjalmarsson
School of Public Policy
2101 Van Munching Hall
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
E-Mail: rhjalmar@umd.edu

David Pozen
Yale Law School
127 Wall Street
New Haven, CT 06511
E-Mail: david.pozen@yale.edu
AB  - This paper analyzes the influence that juvenile offenders serving time in the same correctional facility have on each other’s subsequent criminal behavior. The analysis is based on data on over 8,000 individuals serving time in 169 juvenile correctional facilities during a two-year period in Florida. These data provide a complete record of past crimes, facility assignments, and arrests and adjudications in the year following release for each individual. To control for the non-random assignment to facilities, we include facility and facility-by-prior offense fixed effects, thereby estimating peer effects using only within-facility variation over time. We find strong evidence of peer effects for burglary, petty larceny, felony and misdemeanor drug offenses, aggravated assault, and felony sex offenses; the influence of peers primarily affects individuals who already have some experience in a particular crime category. We also find evidence that the predominant types of peer effects differ in residential versus non-residential facilities; effects in the latter are consistent with network formation among youth serving time close to home.
ER  -