Institutional Friendship: Exploring the Egocentric Networks of Incarcerated Youth

This dissertation examines several aspects of friendship within the unique setting of a juvenile correctional facility. This research is important because it looks at the intersection of friendship and misconduct in the context of a total institution. Since the influence of friendship and peer relationships in both pro-social and anti-social behaviors has been found to be strong, studying friendship in an setting where youth are surrounded by delinquent others is an opportunity to build upon this body of literature. Institutional friendship will be explored using a range of data collected from California's Division of Juvenile Justice including, official data, a youth survey and egocentric networks. The first substantive chapter focuses on the youth who designated themselves as loners within the institution. Since time spent with friends is such a major aspect of a juvenile's daily life, a youth's statement that they have no close friends allows me to study the different individual and facility level characteristics that are associated with a youth's status as a loner. The findings of this chapter underscore how characteristics distinct to those incarcerated, such as having a vulnerable conviction status, can influence loner status. The second substantive chapter of this dissertation is aimed at exploring the youth's friendship network to test for the presence of unique structural profiles across the five juvenile facilities and to see which individual characteristics are associated with a particular network profile. This chapter highlights three different profiles of youth networks and how youth organize into those distinct profiles. The third chapter expands upon the second chapter to test the relationship between network structure and institutional misconduct after the interview. This final substantive chapter finds differences in institutional misconduct predictors across the profiles created in the previous chapter. Each of these chapters is aimed at building upon the literature of youth friendships and delinquency in a unique setting with an understudied population.