The present study explored the benefits of having a friend (i.e., an inmate who helped make another inmate a better person) in prison for males and females. Additional qualitative and quantitative analyses explored gender differences in terms of the frequency with which male and female inmates reported having violent physical encounters in prison, gender differences in inmates' reasons for fighting physically, and gender differences between inmates who reported having a close friend and their likelihood of engaging in prison violence. Incarcerated men and women provided similar descriptions of quality friendship; however, men fought more frequently and for different reasons than women did.

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In this article, we use interview data (n = 383) to evaluate how male and female inmates perceive the help they receive from prison staff members. Men were more likely to claim that staff members help them gain real-world job and educational skills while women claim that staff members made them see the error of their ways and push them to self-improve while in prison. We find that inmates are aligning their personal transformations in prison along gender lines and this may fail to help these incarcerated women prepare for the economic realities of the reentry process.

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