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CrimRxiv
The social foundations of
racial inequalities in arrest
over the life course and in
changing times
Robert J. Sampson Roland Neil
Published on: Jul 18, 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21428/cb6ab371.d3f5d410
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
License (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0)
CrimRxiv The social foundations of racial in equalities in ar rest over the life
course and in ch anging times
2
ABSTRACT
Although racial disparities in criminal justice contact are long-standing and the subject of continuing public
debate, few studies have linked early-life social conditions to racial disparities in arrest over the life course and
in changing times. In this article, we advance and test a theoretical model of racial inequality in long-term
arrest histories on a representative sample of nearly 1,000 individuals from multiple birth cohorts in the Project
on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. Large Black–White disparities in arrests from ages 10 to
40 arise from racial inequalities in exposure to cumulative childhood advantages and disadvantages rather than
from race-specific effects. Smaller but meaningful Hispanic–White gaps follow a similar pattern, and the same
explanations of racial disparities hold across different offense types and across birth cohorts who came of age
at different times during 1995 to 2021. These findings indicate that inequalities in early-life structural factors,
which themselves are historically shaped, trigger processes of cumulative advantage and disadvantage that
produce racial disparities in arrests over the life course and that persist across different points in contemporary
history.