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

This seminar will draw on an original longitudinal study following more than a thousand children across three decades to examine how the lottery of birth timing shapes life trajectories. Children with similar individual, family, and neighborhood backgrounds—but born only about a decade apart, and sometimes much less—faced substantially different risks of arrest, gun carrying, and violence in the transition to adulthood during the profound transformation of crime and punishment in recent decades. By focusing on when we are rather than who we are, and by disentangling the mechanisms driving social change, the findings challenge prevailing approaches to human development, criminal risk assessment, and criminal justice. They also point to a theoretically driven policy orientation that aims to cultivate social character, not just individual character. Implications for designing and analyzing multi-cohort studies that highlight the birth lottery of history in a comparative international perspective will also be discussed.

Professor Robert J. Sampson is a leading sociologist whose work has profoundly shaped contemporary research on crime, urban inequality, and neighborhood effects. He is the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor at Harvard University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His influential scholarship—spanning life course criminology, civic engagement, and the social ecology of cities—has earned him numerous honors, including the Stockholm Prize in Criminology.

The seminar is organized in collaboration with the Department of Criminology at Stockholm University and the Swedish Criminal Justice Policy Action Lab (SCAL) at Linnaeus University.