Showing papers by "Robert J. Sampson published in 2006"

Shared beginnings, divergent lives : delinquent boys to age 70

Abstract: This text analyses newly collected data on crime and social development up to age 70 for 500 men who were remanded to reform school in the 1940s. Born in Boston in the late 1920s and early 1930s, these men were the subjects of the classic study "Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency" by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck (1950). Updating their lives at the close of the twentieth century, and connecting their adult experience to childhood, this book is arguably the longest longitudinal study of age, crime and the life course to date. John Laub and Robert Sampson's long-term data, combined with in-depth interviews, defy the conventional wisdom that links individual traits such as poor verbal skills, limited self-control and difficult temperament to long-term trajectories of offending. The authors reject the idea of categorizing offenders to reveal etiologies of offending - rather, they connect variability in behaviour to social context. They find that men who desisted from crime were rooted in structural routines and had strong social ties to family and community. By uniting life-history narratives with rigorous data analysis, the authors shed new light on long-term trajectories of crime and current policies of crime control.

Does marriage reduce crime? a counterfactual approach to within‐individual causal effects*

Abstract: Although marriage is associated with a plethora of adult outcomes, its causal status remains controversial in the absence of experimental evidence. We address this problem by introducing a counterfactual life- course approach that applies inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) to yearly longitudinal data on marriage, crime, and shared covariates in a sample of 500 high-risk boys followed prospectively from adolescence to age 32. The data consist of criminal histories and death records for all 500 men plus personal interviews, using a life- history calendar, with a stratified subsample of 52 men followed to age 70. These data are linked to an extensive battery of individual and family background measures gathered from childhood to age 17— before entry into marriage. Applying IPTW to multiple specifications that also incorporate extensive time-varying covariates in adulthood, being married is associated with an average reduction of approximately 35 percent in the odds of crime compared to nonmarried states for the same man. These results are robust, supporting the inference that states of marriage causally inhibit crime over the life course.

The Explanation of Crime: Context, Mechanisms, and Development

Abstract: Introduction: Toward a unified approach to crime and its explanation Per-Olof H. Wikstrom and Robert J. Sampson 1. A systematic perspective on crime Mario Bunge 2. How does community context matter? Social mechanisms and the explanation of crime rates Robert J. Sampson 3. Individuals, settings and acts of crime: situational mechanisms and the explanation of crime Per-Olof H. Wikstrom 4. Evidence from behavioral genetics for environmental contributions to antisocial conduct Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi 5. A three-dimensional, cumulative developmental model of serious delinquency Rolf Loeber, N. Wim Slot and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber 6. Self-control and social control of deviant behavior in context: development and interactions along the life course Marc LeBlanc 7. Desistance, social bonds and human agency: a theoretical explanation Anthony Bottoms Index.

The Explanation of Crime: Introduction: Toward a unified approach to crime and its explanation

Abstract: “Integration” has assumed a central role in criminological discourse. There are at least four types of integration – of theories (e.g., social learning and social control), methods (e.g., qualitative and quantitative), levels of analysis (e.g., neighborhood and individual), and disciplines (e.g., psychology and sociology). The majority of integrative efforts in criminology have aimed at the first type, the integration of theoretical models derived from classical schools of thought on the causes of crime – almost always sociological. Some oft-cited attempts at theoretical integration in this realm include Elliott, Ageton, & Canter (1979), Messner, Krohn, & Liska (1989), and Braithwaite (1989). In recent years the multi-level integration of data across levels of analysis has also come on strong, especially in the form of contextual analyses that purport to estimate “neighborhood effects” on individual behavior (for a review, see Sampson, Morenoff, & Gannon-Rowley 2002). Despite the seeming consensus that integrative modes of inquiry are important, there is still no consensus approach and it is hard to identify concrete new discoveries or significant breakthroughs in criminology that have been made in the name of integration. Put simply, the benefits for knowledge remain largely a promissory note. Why is this so? A main reason, of course, is that the task is enormously difficult. Even in the so-called “hard sciences” integration is hard to come by – it takes lots of time and effort so there is no reason to expect a fast payoff.