Selected publications are shown below, a complete listing can be found here.
Bouchard, M. (2020). Collaboration and Boundaries in Organized Crime: A Network Perspective. Crime and Justice, 49(1).
A network approach helps us better specify and model collaboration among people involved in organized crime. The focus on collaboration raises the boundary specification problem: Where do criminal organizations start, where do they end, and who is involved? Traditional approaches sometimes assume the existence of simple, rigid structures when complexity and fluidity are the norms....
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...
Hashimi, S., & Bouchard, M. (2017). On to the next one? Using social network data to inform police target prioritization. Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management, 40(4), 768-782.
Purpose: Target prioritization is routinely done among law enforcement agencies, but the criteria to establish which targets will lead to the most crime reduction are neither systematic, nor do they take into account the networks in which offenders are embedded. The purpose of this paper is to propose network capital as a guide for prioritization...
Bouchard, M., & Hashimi, S. (2017). When is a “war” a “wave?” Two approaches for the detection of waves in gang homicides. Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 59(2), 198-226.
Gang violence and gang “wars” are often described as coming in waves, but little empirical work has been conducted to distinguish between actual “waves” of violence and the more common ups and downs that trends in homicides typically go through. We propose two approaches for the detection of waves of gang-related homicides in the Lower...
Wong, J. S., Gravel, J., Bouchard, M., Descormiers, K., & Morselli, C. (2016). Promises kept? A meta-analysis of gang membership prevention programs. Journal of Criminological Research, Policy and Practice, 2(2), 134-147.
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to synthesize the effects of gang prevention programs on gang membership. Design: The authors conducted a systematic literature review across 19 bibliographic databases and a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of these strategies. Findings: The database search resulted in 3,850 hits. Of the 162 studies that were screened in...
McCuish, E. C., Bouchard, M., & Corrado, R. (2015). The search for suitable homicide co-offenders among gang members. Journal of contemporary criminal justice, 31(3), 319-336.
Little is known about homicide co-offending networks at the individual gang member level. Of particular interest is whether and to what degree gang members who are selected to participate in murder are different from those who are not. The current study constructed the co-offense network of 18 participants from the Incarcerated Serious and Violent Young...
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...
Bouchard, M., & Morselli, C. (2014). Opportunistic structures of organized crime. In L. Paoli (Ed.), The oxford handbook of organized crime. (pp. 288-302). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Organized crime researchers have often referred to the mass of small and ephemeral groups that form in any given criminal market as opportunistic operators and less organized (or disorganized) forms of criminal operations. Indeed, such groups have been excluded, at times, from the organized crime category. In this essay, we demonstrate that such opportunistic structures...
Gravel, J., Bouchard, M., Descormiers, K., Wong, J., Morselli, C. (2013). Keeping promises: Logic models, and the design of a new classification of gang control strategies. Journal of Criminal Justice, 41, 228-242.
We argue that inadequate frameworks to compare similar gang control strategies, and the scarcity of well-designed evaluations have hindered our ability to determine the effectiveness of existing programs. This article proposes a new typology of gang control strategies to use with logic models as tools to improve gang program evaluation. Link to full text on...
Bouchard, M., Spindler, A. (2010). Gangs, groups, and delinquency: Does organization matter? Journal of Criminal Justice, 38, 921-933.
A consistent finding of research on delinquency has been that gang members show higher levels of delinquent behavior than non-gang members. However, research attempting to understand the mechanisms underlying this finding is lacking. The basic premise of the current article is that the level of organization found in delinquent groups and gangs matters in clarifying...