Receiving Social Support after Short-term Confinement: How Support Pre- and During-confinement Contribute

• Author: Hanneke Palmen,Paul Nieuwbeerta,Audrey Hickert,Anja Dirkzwager
• Published date: 01 July 2019
• Date: 01 July 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0022427819826302
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Receiving Social

Support after Short-

term Confinement:

How Support Pre- and

During-confinement

Contribute

Audrey Hickert

1

, Hanneke Palmen

2

,

Anja Dirkzwager

3

, and Paul Nieuwbeerta

2

Abstract

Objectives: To test the independent links between social support that exists

prior to and during confinement with support after release for adult males

incarcerated for an average of 11 mo nths in the Netherlands. Methods :

Longitudinal data from a large study on consequences of confinement, the

Prison Project, are used to describe instrumental (live with) and expressive

(core network) support before and after confinement from four sources

(parent, partner, other family, friend) and during-confinement visits by the

same groups. Multiequation models examine the contribution of precon-

finement support and visits to postconfinement support, while also

1

University at Albany, Albany, NY, USA

2

Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands

3

Netherlands Institute for the Study on Crime and Law Enforcement, Amsterdam,

the Netherlands

Corresponding Author:

Audrey Hickert, University at Albany, 135 Western Avenue, Draper Hall Rm. 219, Albany,

NY 12222, USA.

Email: ahickert@albany.edu

Journal of Research in Crime and

Delinquency

2019, Vol. 56(4) 563-604

ªThe Author(s) 2019

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0022427819826302

journals.sagepub.com/home/jrc

describing the interrelationship of support sources. Results: Preconfinement

support is consistently related to receiving the same type after release.

Receiving visits during confinement has a unique relationship with receiving

postconfinement expressive support across all relational groups. Only visits

from partners has an additional influence on instrumental support after

release. Postconfinement support across provider groups is interrelated,

with a positive correlation across providers for expressive support and a

substitution effect for instrumental support between parents and partners.

Conclusions: After controlling for important preconfinement differences in

support, visits remain significantly related to postconfinement expressive

support, suggesting a possible mechanism by which visits help improve

reentry outcomes.

Keywords

social support, confinement, prison visit, instrumental support, expressive

support

The importance of social support in criminological theories is long-

standing. Building on social control theory (Hirschi 1969), Kornhauser

(1978) suggested that social support is a vital mechanism for indirect exter-

nal social control because the cost of violating norms is higher for persons

with valuable relationships. Similarly, life-course theory emphasizes the

quality of conventional bonds, implying they provide meaningful benefits

(Sampson and Laub 1990, 1993). Cullen (1994) directly advocated for the

use of a “social support paradigm” in criminology, highlighting two theo-

retically important types from the mental health literature (Lin 1986):

expressive (emotional) and instrumental (practical or tangible). Today, its

intersection with many criminological theories is widely recognized (e.g.,

Boman and Mowen 2018).

Social support is particularly relevant when studying the consequences

of confinement. Support during confinement (calls, mail, visits) has been

linked to lower institutional misconduct (Cochran 2012; Jiang and Winfree

2006; Siennick, Mears, and Bales 2013), concurrent (Liu, Baker, and Pick-

ett 2016) and postrelease (La Vigne et al. 2005) perceptions of relationship

quality, and expectations for future support (Meyers et al. 2017). Research-

ers suggest that social support is a potential mechanism thro ugh which

prison visits may reduce recidivism ( Bales and Mears 2008; Duwe and

Clark 2013). Social support during reentry has been linked to lower drug

564 Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 56(4)

use, more employment (Brunton-Smith and McCarthy 2017), and reduced

recidivism after jail (Spjeldnes et al. 2012) and prison (Barrick, Lattimore,

and Visher 2014; Brunton-Smith and McCarthy 2017; Mowen and Visher

2015). Increasingly, informal social support networks have been identified

as de facto reentry services for many leaving jai ls (Bobbitt and Nelson

2004; Comfort 2016) and prisons (Harding et al. 2014; Western et al. 2015).

Given the significant history of social support in criminological thought

and its role in reentry, the scarcity of adequate empirical research on the

development of social support around confinement is surprising. This gap is

notable because an appreciation of the development of support during and

after confinement is important for understanding theoretical mechanisms

and germane to policy decisions, especially those seeking to improve reen-

try outcomes broadly. Deficits in the current empirical tests comprise four

main areas.

First, only a handful of studies in this area have longitudinal designs with

multiple waves (Barrick et al. 2014; Brunton-Smith and McCarthy 2017; La

Vigne et al. 2005; Mowen and Visher 2015; Pettus-Davis et al. 2017;

Wallace et al. 2016; see Table 1). Further, only two have pre-, during-, and

postconfinement support measures (Brunton-Smith and McCarthy 2017; La

Vigne et al. 2005). Measurement at multiple points is critical for under-

standing changes and the unique contribution of support at each point to

later ones.

Second, most prior studies operationalize social support without distin-

guishing providers. Theoretically , relationships are a key component as

social support “is not a property of individual or environment” but is com-

prised of transactions between persons (e.g., Vaux 1988:297; see also Anto-

nucci 2001). Social support is comprised of specific actions provided by

individuals with whom a person has a relationship. Further, social support

theory proposes that the longevity and type of support will differ for

ascribed (family), optional (friend), and blended (partner) relationships

(Antonucci and Akiyama 1995). Friends typically provide short-term crisis

intervention, while support for chronic needs is relegated to family (Anto-

nucci and Akiyama 1995). Characterizations of social support in the quan-

titative criminological literature as broad-based phenomena fail to

recognize the meaningful role of relationships over time in providing tar-

geted, supportive actions.

1

To practically enhance access to support through

policy, we must understand how concrete types of support operate through

relationships that are available to detainees.

Third, a separate—but related—reason for the limited understanding of

social support around confinement is that prior studies typically

Hickert et al. 565