At the end of his career, Carlo Morselli started to be interested in how the structure of social relations could influence offenders’ prospects for reintegration and desistance. This article analyzes the data from his research project on that topic. The impacts of offenders’ relationships have traditionally been discussed from a dichotomous, risk-centered perspective opposing antisocial and prosocial peers. Social network studies allow a step back and a global view of the contexts and processes in which relationships shape trajectories. This article focuses on the ego networks of offenders as they reintegrate with society and sheds light on triadic patterns associated with increased optimism toward desistance. Interviews were conducted with residents of halfway houses (48 men and 24 women), with offenders followed by a community agency (25 men), and with incarcerated youth offenders (24 male teenagers). Structured interviews addressed multiple aspects of the lives of the offenders, including their social relations, prosocial and antisocial. A mixed-method approach was used to understand the influence of social relations in the perception of desistance potential success. First, logistic regressions were used to assess the effect of individual’s and egocentric networks’ characteristics on optimism toward desistance. Second, case studies of ego network sociograms illustrate the results and suggest hypotheses about processes that may explain them. Results show that optimism is higher when prosocial personal networks are denser, and is lower when antisocial networks are open, and as antisocial peers are connected to prosocial ties. The implications of these patterns for offenders’ desistance and network-based interventions are discussed.
Carlo Morselli s’intéressait depuis plusieurs années aux avenues possibles pour appliquer l’analyse de réseaux aux objectifs des différents milieux de pratique. La littérature souligne le potentiel d’une telle approche et l’importance chez les détenus d’entretenir des liens positifs pour compenser l’absence de leurs proches. Cette recherche explore les réseaux de confiance de jeunes contrevenants hébergés au Centre de réadaptation Cité-des-Prairies à Montréal afin d’en examiner l’utilité dans le quotidien des unités. L’argumentaire caractérise la confiance de deux unités à travers le temps. Trois éléments apparaissent particulièrement d’intérêt pour favoriser la compréhension du milieu : le biais qu’entraîne la présence d’acteurs englobants sur la densité de confiance ; la limitation des erreurs de perception des liens de confiance grâce à la stabilité du réseau ; et le lien apparemment positif entre confiance et climat de groupe. Les résultats ouvrent une discussion qui encourage ce type de milieu à intégrer une approche sociométrique, en montrant comment le réseau de confiance pourrait servir les interventions quotidiennes vers l’atteinte des objectifs du milieu.
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