Building criminal capital behind bars: Peer effects in juvenile corrections
Abstract
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. Tb control for the nonrandom 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
nonresidential facilities; effects in the latter are consistent with network formation
among youth serving time close to home. © 2009 by the President and fellows of Harvard
College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/1996Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1162/qjec.2009.124.1.105Publication Info
Bayer, P; Hjalmarsson, R; & Pozen, D (2009). Building criminal capital behind bars: Peer effects in juvenile corrections. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 124(1). pp. 105-147. 10.1162/qjec.2009.124.1.105. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/1996.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Patrick Bayer
Gilhuly Family Distinguished Professor in Economics
Bayer's research focuses on wide range of subjects including racial inequality and
segregation, social interactions, housing markets, education, and criminal justice.
His most recent work has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American
Economic Review, Econometrica, and the Review of Financial Studies. He is currently
working on projects that examine jury representation and its consequences, the intergenerational
consequences of residential and school segregation, neighborhood

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