The Effect of Prosocial and Antisocial Relationships Structure on Offenders’ Optimism towards Desistance

Abstract

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.