Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans

A leading sociologist's groundbreaking three-decade study challenges outdated views of crime and character, revealing that traditional risk factors alone poorly predict children's futures.

Between 1970 and 2020, the United States experienced first a dramatic rise in crime and incarceration, then an unexpected decline. Along with plummeting violence came declines in substance use, car accidents, child poverty, and lead exposure. By 2020, incarceration rates hit a twenty-five-year low, with African Americans benefiting the most. Yet these positive shifts have not registered in public discourse or policies that continue to rely on outdated studies and reductive narratives of moral character and personal responsibility.

A major reason for this oversight lies in how social scientists study youth development--typically through single-birth-cohort approaches that fail to capture generational change. In a pioneering three-decade study of over 1,000 Chicago children across multiple age-groups, Robert J. Sampson challenges this convention. He finds that children with similar self-control and family backgrounds, yet born just a decade apart, experienced dramatically different life paths. Strikingly, children born in the mid-1980s faced twice the likelihood of arrest by their mid-twenties than those born ten years later.

This research challenges deeply ingrained assumptions about social decline and the importance of individual fortitude. Sampson spotlights the role of shifting social conditions and structural change in driving measurable improvements in youth trajectories.

The era into which a child is born shapes their future as profoundly as race, upbringing, or neighborhood. Rethinking how we understand progress, inequality, and policy means recognizing the transformative power of time itself.