Robert J. Sampson’s research while affiliated with Harvard University and other places

A burgeoning literature suggests that criminal justice contact in adolescence hinders educational attainment, but prior research primarily considers short-term outcomes and relies on self-reported arrest information. In this article, we leverage Illinois administrative records over 25 years linked to a multicohort longitudinal study to provide estimates of whether an officially recorded juvenile arrest lingers beyond high school through college completion. We find that juvenile arrest is associated with a 20 to 30 percentage-point decrease in one’s likelihood of graduating from a four-year college. This association persists for college enrollees and is consistent across sociodemographic groups and birth cohorts. Given the unequal and prevalent nature of juvenile arrest, the association’s durability across time periods characterized by vast social-structural changes, and the potentially unique vulnerabilities of system-involved students on college campuses, our study offers new insights on how official legal entanglement prior to adulthood may contribute to inequality in the United States.

Most homicides in the United States are committed using a handgun, but little research examines gun carrying over critical stages of the life course and changing contexts of violence. Notably, although most of the handgun homicides are committed by adults, most research on concealed gun carrying focuses on adolescents in single cohort studies. Using more than 25 years of longitudinal multicohort data from Chicago, 1994–2021, we show that pathways of concealed gun carrying are distinct between adolescence and adulthood. Adolescent carrying is often age-limited and responsive to direct exposure to gun violence (witnessing and victimization), while adult carrying is a persistent behavior that is less tied to direct exposure. The onset of concealed carry is also a strong predictor of later gun use (shooting or brandishing), and we find distinct patterns of gun use between individuals who first carry in adolescence versus adulthood. We discuss the implications of these dual pathways for research and policies on firearm use.

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.

Intergenerational transmission processes have long been of interest to demographers, but prior research on the intergenerational transmission of criminal justice contact is relatively sparse and limited by its lack of attention to the correlated “family troubles” and familial incarceration that predate criminal justice contact. In this article, we provide a test of the intergenerational transmission of criminal justice contact after adjusting extensively for these factors that predate such contact by linking longitudinal data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods with official arrest histories from 1995 to 2020. The results provide support for three conclusions. First, parental criminal justice contact is associated with a shorter time to first arrest and a larger number of arrests even after rigorously accounting for selection. Second, robustness checks demonstrate that neither the magnitude nor the significance of the findings is sensitive to model choices. Third, associations are strongest among White individuals and inconsistently significant for African American and Hispanic individuals. Despite large recent crime declines, the results indicate that parental criminal justice contact elevates the criminal justice contact of the adult children of the prison boom, independent of the often-overlooked troubles that predate criminal justice contact, and that these associations are strongest among the White population.

This article presents a theoretical and methodological framework for comparative urban studies grounded in the proposition that a neighborhood depends not only on its own conditions, as typically conceived, but also the conditions of the neighborhoods to which its residents are connected, through networks of everyday urban mobility. Based on this framework, we highlight three arguments and associated applications based on the analyses of networks of movement throughout large American cities. The first is that even though residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods travel far and wide, their relative isolation and segregation persist. Second, mobility-based socioeconomic disadvantage, or what has been termed triple neighborhood disadvantage, explains neighborhood well-being independent of residential-based disadvantage. Third, a city’s level of social connectedness depends on how uneven and concentrated networks of everyday mobility are among its neighborhoods, which in turn are hypothesized to predict social behavior across cities beyond that expected by their residential-based segregation. The results offer a new way of thinking about neighborhood effects, the dynamics of everyday urban mobility, spatial inequality, and social segregation that can be studied in a comparative framework in cities anywhere.

Nearly 35 years ago, Sampson and Laub popularized the concept of desistance from crime and isolated core factors that promote and inhibit this process. In this article, we introduce the concept of intergenerational desistance and provide guidance on measuring and explaining this process, encouraging researchers to think of the life-course of crime in terms of both individuals and generations. We first review research on the intergenerational transmission of family criminality and criminal justice contact, relying also on research outside of criminology to highlight how using broader conceptions of the family, including social parents, entire generations, and three (or more) generations could enliven this area. Bridging these literatures allows us to then introduce the concept of intergenerational desistance and elaborate on the concept of intergenerational escalation and demonstrate how they can be measured using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN). We close by developing a research agenda for considering intergenerational desistance and escalation in ways that enhance our understanding of how the life-course of crime, criminal justice contact, and other troubles in life (e.g., with alcohol, drugs, and mental health) progress through families. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 7 is January 2024. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Risk assessment instruments (RAIs) are widely used to aid high-stakes decision-making in criminal justice settings and other areas such as health care and child welfare. These tools, whether using machine learning or simpler algorithms, typically assume a time-invariant relationship between predictors and outcome. Because societies are themselves changing and not just individuals, this assumption may be violated in many behavioral settings, generating what we call cohort bias. Analyzing criminal histories in a cohort-sequential longitudinal study of children, we demonstrate that regardless of model type or predictor sets, a tool trained to predict the likelihood of arrest between the ages of 17 and 24 y on older birth cohorts systematically overpredicts the likelihood of arrest for younger birth cohorts over the period 1995 to 2020. Cohort bias is found for both relative and absolute risks, and it persists for all racial groups and within groups at highest risk for arrest. The results imply that cohort bias is an underappreciated mechanism generating inequality in contacts with the criminal legal system that is distinct from racial bias. Cohort bias is a challenge not only for predictive instruments with respect to crime and justice, but also for RAIs more broadly.