Selected publications are shown below, a complete listing can be found here.
Kreager, D., Young,J., Haynie, D., Schaefer, D., Bouchard, M., Davidson, K. (2020). In the eye of the beholder: Meaning and structure of informal status in women’s and men’s prisons
Applying an abductive mixed‐methods approach, we investigate the informal status systems in three women's prison units (across two prisons) and one men's prison unit. Qualitative analyses suggest “old head” narratives—where age, time in prison, sociability, and prison wisdom confer unit status—are prevalent across all four contexts. Perceptions of maternal “caregivers” and manipulative “bullies,” however, are...
McCuish, E., Bouchard, M., & Beauregard, E. A. (2020). Network‑Based Examination of the Longitudinal Association Between Psychopathy and Offending Versatility. Journal of Quantitative Criminology.
Objectives Concerns about the value of features of psychopathy to explanations of offending may be driven by challenges with testing this relationship as opposed to the construct’s limited predictive validity. The current study introduced psychopathology network modeling as an analytic strategy capable of addressing these challenges through a more nuanced description of the structural and...
McCuish, E., Bouchard, M., Beauregard, E., & Corrado, R. (2019). A Network Approach to Understanding the Structure of Core Symptoms of Psychopathic Personality Disturbance in Adolescent Offenders. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 47(9), 1467-1482.
A central aim of research on psychopathic personality disturbance (PPD) involves identifying core features of the construct. Such aims have been addressed primarily through prototypicality studies and research using item-response theory. More recently, the logic of social network analysis was extended to psychopathology research to examine which symptoms are most central to PPD networks. Such...
Ouellet, M., Bouchard, M., & Charette, Y. (2019). One gang dies, another gains? The network dynamics of criminal group persistence. Criminology, 57(1), 5-33.
What leads a minority of criminal groups to persist over time? Although most criminal groups are characterized by short life spans, a subset manages to survive extended periods. Contemporary research on criminal groups has been primarily descriptive and static, leaving important questions on the correlates of group persistence unanswered. By drawing from competing perspectives on...
Ouellet, F., & Bouchard, M. (2017). Only a Matter of Time? The Role of Criminal Competence in Avoiding Arrest. Justice Quarterly, 34(4), 699-726.
While prior research has shown that the probability of detection plays a role in the decision-making of many offenders, much less is known on offenders’ relative success in avoiding arrest. In this study, we draw from detailed criminal career data on 172 offenders involved in lucrative criminal activities to examine the role of criminal competence...
Ouellet, M., Bouchard, M., & Hart, M. (2017). Criminal collaboration and risk: The drivers of Al Qaeda’s network structure before and after 9/11. Social Networks, 51, 171-177.
A group’s resilience is often linked to its network structure. While decentralized network properties have been associated with resilience at the group-level, little is known about the individual-level factors that lead groups to adopt these structures. Criminal groups, consistently faced with unexpected external disruptions, provide an opportunity to examine individual decisions to collaborate across periods...
Schaefer, D., Bouchard, M., Young, J., & Kreager, D. (2017). Friends in locked places: An investigation of prison inmate network structure, Social Networks, 51, 88-103.
The current study investigates informal social structure among prison inmates. Data come from the Prison Inmate Network Study (PINS), a project focused on a unit of a Pennsylvania medium security men’s prison. We focus on 205 inmates and their “get along with” network – an approximation of friendship in other settings. We find a weak...
Kreager, D. A., Schaefer, D. R., Bouchard, M., Haynie, D. L., Wakefield, S., Young, J., & Zajac, G. (2016). Toward a criminology of inmate networks. Justice Quarterly, 33(6), 1000-1028.
The mid-twentieth century witnessed a surge of American prison ethnographies focused on inmate society and the social structures that guide inmate life. Ironically, this literature virtually froze in the 1980s just as the country entered a period of unprecedented prison expansion, and has only recently begun to thaw. In this manuscript, we develop a rationale...
Bouchard, M., Konarski, R. (2014). Assessing the core membership of a youth gang from its co-offending network. Pp. 81-93 in C. Morselli (Ed.). Crime and Networks. Criminology and Justice Series. New York: Routledge.
The dynamic and sometimes diffuse nature of membership make gang boundaries sometimes difficult to discern for law enforcement officials or researchers, and even for members themselves. The current study draws on social network analysis of co-offending data to assess its utility in identifying the “core” membership of a youth gang active in a rural region...
Nash, R., Bouchard, M., Malm, A. (2013). Investing in people: Social networks in the diffusion of a large-scale fraud. Social Networks, 35, 686-698.
This paper draws from social network analysis and diffusion theory to study the case of a mortgage fraud that spread undetected for five years in British Columbia, Canada. The fraud is studied from the point of view of 559 victims who unknowingly invested in the Ponzi scheme which defrauded 2285 investors for a total of...