Marked by Time
How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans
Published on 10. February 2026
Book
Hardback
288 pages
978-0-674-98754-8 (ISBN)
Description
A leading sociologist's groundbreaking three-decade study challenges outdated views of crime and character, revealing that traditional risk factors alone poorly predict children's futures.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 a dramatic rise in crime and incarceration, followed by an unexpected decline. Along with plummeting violence came reductions 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 Yet these positive shifts have not registered in public discourse or policies, which continue to rely on outdated studies and reductive narratives of moral character and personal responsibility.
A major reason for this oversight is 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 one thousand Chicago children across multiple cohorts, Robert J. Sampson challenges this convention. He finds that children with similar self-control and family backgrounds, 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 reframes deeply ingrained assumptions about ongoing 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, along with new risks that threaten these gains.
The era into which a child is born shapes their future as profoundly as race, upbringing, or neighborhood. To rethink progress, inequality, and policy, we must first acknowledge how time itself leaves a transformative mark on individual lives.
Between 1970 and 2020, the United States experienced a dramatic rise in crime and incarceration, followed by an unexpected decline. Along with plummeting violence came reductions 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, which continue to rely on outdated studies and reductive narratives of moral character and personal responsibility.
A major reason for this oversight is 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 one thousand Chicago children across multiple cohorts, Robert J. Sampson challenges this convention. He finds that children with similar self-control and family backgrounds, 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 reframes deeply ingrained assumptions about ongoing 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, along with new risks that threaten these gains.
The era into which a child is born shapes their future as profoundly as race, upbringing, or neighborhood. To rethink progress, inequality, and policy, we must first acknowledge how time itself leaves a transformative mark on individual lives.
Reviews / Votes
The biggest problem that Sampson's book highlights is how wrong it is to focus on individual character traits when it comes to predicting crime and determining punishment...But clearly, even though individual character traits matter, they don't on their own determine how likely someone is to commit a crime. By comparing one birth cohort with the next, Sampson shows that our collective social or national character may ultimately shape people's fate to the largest extent. -- Abdallah Fayyad * Boston Globe * Disquieting but effective, Sampson's book makes a compelling case for rooting out character-based assumptions - and for factoring in historical context - at all stages of the criminal-justice system...Sampson's style is characteristically engaging, with effective and straightforward visualizations of sometimes-complex analyses. For the interested reader, it's a treasure trove of directions for further research. What's more, it's a substantial extension of a robust and profoundly influential body of work - one that should constitute a turning point in the academic and policy conversation around criminal propensity. -- Christopher Browning * Nature * Impressive...Sampson does an excellent job demonstrating why the entire exercise of determining why people commit crimes-the central enterprise of criminology-is essentially misguided. -- Charles Fain Lehman * Washington Free Beacon * An important achievement. It demonstrates that focusing on individual-level factors cannot account for macro-level trends and implores researchers to be cognizant of the limitations of individual-level assessments in making predictions about criminal behavior. Marked by Time is a must read for those interested in life-course research on criminal offending. -- James Tuttle * Crime Forecast * A strong treatise on how American youth are involved in crime and incarceration...draws on data from over 1,000 youth to provide a detailed account of how different youth cohorts have evolved over time. -- D. E. Kelly * Choice * Most people's ideas about crime come from headlines, TV shows, and politically biased conventional wisdom. Robert Sampson is a pioneer in sophisticated, evidence-based analyses of crime, and here he explores a profound but underappreciated fact about trends: they can reflect a changing zeitgeist, a shifting mixture of ages, or a turnover of generations. Sampson deftly disentangles them and presents a new understanding of the dramatic changes in American crime rates. -- Steven Pinker, author of <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined</i> A landmark achievement from Rob Sampson-bold, incisive, and destined to reshape conventional thinking across public policy, law enforcement, and the social sciences. This is an instant classic. -- Bruce Western, president, Russell Sage Foundation Rob Sampson is criminology's leading researcher: an innovative social scientist who has, time and again, improved the field's methodology, data-gathering, and theory. Marked by Time once again breaks new ground - this time by demonstrating the striking significance for birth-cohort studies and for criminological theorizing of the interaction between historical change and individual development. A major contribution! -- David Garland, author of <i>Law and Order Leviathan: America's Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment</i>More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge, Mass
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
College/higher education
Illustrations
2 photos, 36 illus.
Dimensions
Height: 237 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 31 mm
Weight
586 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-674-98754-8 (9780674987548)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Robert J. Sampson is Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor at Harvard University, Affiliated Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect.