Robert J. Sampson talks to Adam Gopnik about crime, time and life trajectories
Sociologist Robert J. Sampson’s new book, “Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans,” draws on three decades of data from the landmark Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods to argue that the era in which a person comes of age matters as much as, or even more than, their individual circumstances.
On Monday, April 27, New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik spoke with Sampson at an event hosted by Vital City, NYU Wagner and the Russell Sage Foundation. The attached video is unedited; the transcript that follows is edited for clarity and length.
Adam Gopnik: This is a work of social science, but for those of us who are essayists, it’s an astonishing thing — it’s not your opinions. It’s driven by data collected over a very long time. Tell us about the specifics of the project, and more broadly, what drew you to this kind of empirical sociology.
Robert J. Sampson: The ideas actually developed over time. Let me take you back to the beginning. The study started in the early 1990s, when I was on the faculty at the University of Chicago. It was a large-scale collaborative effort — what you might call big science — because at the time, academics were really trying to figure out how to understand urban violence. In the early 1990s, violence had been rising since the 1970s and ‘80s, but things were really coming to a head. New York had over 2,000 murders. Chicago wasn’t far behind.
We were designing the study in 1992, and there was a particular incident that I mention in the book. A young boy named Dantrell Davis, just 7 years old, was walking with his mother on a sunny day when he was shot and killed by someone trying to take out a gang rival. It was emblematic of the crisis. So we designed what became the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods to understand how children developed within their social contexts — not pitting individuals against neighborhoods, but trying to understand both.
The data collection was a monumental effort. We enrolled about 6,000 children across different ages and followed them over five to six years, conducting interviews with mothers, children and other caretakers. We collected original neighborhood data — we even drove down streets with video cameras to observe conditions. About 100 to 120 people were involved in data collection at peak. We were lucky to get funding, and I felt lucky to be part of it.
Gopnik: Just as you were starting the study, the era of the so-called “super predator” was beginning. That sets up a kind of dramatic tension at the heart of the book.
Sampson: Exactly. To illustrate the argument, I use two kids from the study. I call one Darnell, born in 1995, raised by a single parent in one of the highest-poverty neighborhoods in the city — every risk factor one might think would predict a life of crime. I pair him with Andre, born in 1980, who came of age in the 1980s, around age 13 during the peak of violence. Same neighborhood, same race, same poverty, same family structure. Environmentally similar in almost every way — but walking into very different futures. And indeed, they had very different lives.
That’s the core of the book. It’s not a narrative about two individuals. It’s a study of birth cohorts — using that comparison to make the argument that when we are born shapes outcomes in ways we haven’t fully reckoned with.
Gopnik: One of the philosophical foundations of the book seems to be that social experience is malleable and changeable — that it isn’t always fixed. That’s a particular tradition in American sociology, isn’t it?
Sampson: Absolutely. A lot of criminological research, at least historically, has been rooted in the assumption of stable propensity — the idea that criminal character is essentially built into the person. That’s embedded in the concept of the “super predator.” The book challenges that idea by looking at cohorts coming of age in very different historical contexts.
One of the problems with prior research is that most studies follow the same people through time — a single cohort. That’s a wonderful device, but as we age, time marches on. There’s a philosophical aphorism from the ancient Greeks: No man steps into the same river twice. The river changes; the man changes. So I wanted a design that could look at kids starting at very young ages across different birth years, all followed through the same historical window. That allowed us to compare children coming of age in genuinely different circumstances.
Gopnik: And that leads to what struck me as the central finding of the book. What you’re saying, in essence, is that it’s not where you’re raised, not even by whom you’re raised — it’s when you’re raised.
Sampson: That’s the strong version of the argument, yes. There’s a basic fact about crime called the age-crime curve: Across virtually all data sources, across different countries and historical periods, criminal activity rises sharply in adolescence, peaks in the late teens or early twenties, and then declines. Teenagers commit a disproportionate share of crime — all parents know this. But what the cohort comparison reveals is that when one is a teenager is centrally important.
Kids from the older cohorts — those born in the 1980s — had arrest trajectories that were substantially higher and persisted later into life. Younger cohorts, even controlling for race, family structure, neighborhood poverty and other individual characteristics, showed dramatically lower arrest rates. When you adjust for all of those factors and the cohort difference still holds, that tells you something fundamental: It’s the historical moment, not the individual profile.
Gopnik: And this is, in a sense, a reproach to both sides of the political debate about crime.
Sampson: I think that’s right. There are roughly three views. One holds that there are simply bad people — wicked individuals — and nothing to do except separate them from society. Then there’s a more incentive-oriented view: It’s about deterrence, incarceration, the rules. And then the sociological view, which I subscribe to, emphasizes social ties, social controls and informal community norms.
What the data show is that economic indicators — GNP, unemployment, poverty rates — don’t really explain why crime rose or fell in consistent ways. But something was changing. What was happening, particularly as the younger cohorts came of age, is that the world changed around them in ways that made arrest much less likely.
Gopnik: What changed?
Sampson: Several things. First, the collapse of the drug war — or at least of drug arrests. When we think about mass incarceration, we tend to think of arrests rising. But actually, arrests were declining starting in the late 1990s and into the 2000s. Drug arrests dropped around 75%in some areas. Disorder arrests — the kind associated with broken windows policing — dropped about 90%. That is a fundamentally different social world for a kid growing up.
At the same time, the drug market itself changed. There’s a sociologist, Randol Contreras, who studied the South Bronx and whose own life illustrated the point. He came of age slightly later than the kids who had become drug dealers, and by the time his cohort arrived, the profits had collapsed. The South Bronx was improving, gentrifying. The pull of the drug economy simply wasn’t what it had been.
Gopnik: Broken windows theory is one of the hypotheses you examine. Is it a concept with some residual value, or is it empty?
Sampson: It is a concept — it’s not nothing. But I think it’s been misapplied. The original Wilson and Kelling article from 1982 was actually more nuanced than what came after it. They were talking about the breakdown of informal social controls and the importance of working with communities to clean things up. Over time, that morphed into much more aggressive policing — massive stop-and-frisk of young people without cause. That’s not what Wilson and Kelling had in mind, and it’s not responsible for the crime decline, in my view.
Perceptions of disorder vary a great deal depending on context — whether you’re in a wealthy neighborhood or a poor one, whether you’re higher or lower income. And a fair amount of research suggests that disorder itself is not what’s driving crime. Most crime control happens not because there’s a police officer on the corner. It’s the everyday regulations and norms — parents supervising their children, community organizations getting involved — that prevent crime.
Gopnik: Patrick Sharkey’s work puts a lot of weight on community organizations. You look at that too.
Sampson: Yes, absolutely. What happened in many cities over this period can be thought of as reclaiming urban space — the no-man’s-land areas that we all saw in the 1980s and ’90s, reclaimed in multiple ways. Community organizations, particularly those that received increased funding and focused on youth, showed real crime declines. You can attribute a meaningful portion of the crime drop to community organizing — not policing.
There’s also interesting experimental work on cleaning up vacant lots. Researchers took abandoned lots that were sites of crime and fear and transformed them into green spaces. What happened? People started using those spaces, interacting. There were more eyes on the street, in Jane Jacobs’ sense. People were more willing to intervene. Crime went down. It seems almost too simple, but it’s part of the broader argument that environments matter — that environmental policy is crime policy.
Gopnik: You even address the lead hypothesis, which I’ll confess I initially thought was a kind of red herring.
Sampson: I never expected to deal with it either. But over time, through colleagues and the accumulating research — including historical data on lead pipes and the leaded gasoline phaseout — I came to believe there was something there. Lead poisoning is a form of toxic environment, just like financial stress or neighborhood violence. For a while, it was everywhere. In some Chicago neighborhoods, 70% to 80% of children had elevated blood lead levels.
We were fortunate to get data from the Chicago Department of Public Health. For the infant cohort, higher lead levels were associated with more antisocial behavior later in life. And the decline in lead levels — which was sharpest in the poorest communities — tracks with the decline in problem behavior. It’s not the whole story, but it’s part of it. I found the research compelling enough to include it, and I think it’s a real vindication of empirical social science — because it sounds tabloid-ish at first, but you look into it carefully and find there’s something there.
Gopnik: Let’s talk about what the book means for policy. It seems to have some uncomfortable implications for a lot of tools that criminal justice systems currently rely on — risk assessment, prediction instruments, cost-benefit analysis.
Sampson: Prediction is a key area. A lot of risk assessment instruments are built on the assumption of stable propensity — that past behavior predicts future behavior in ways that don’t change over time. But our data show that the relationship between predictors and outcomes has been shifting. We took prediction technology, trained it on the older cohort, and applied it to the younger cohort. We overpredicted by 50% to 90%. That’s not a small error — it’s a difference of kind.
Criminal history records are used in so many decisions: bail, sentencing enhancements, tenant screening, employment. To the extent that the probability of being arrested in the past is baked into those records, you are, in effect, making predictions based on when someone was born — what I call cohort bias. The younger cohorts are simply less likely to have been arrested, and instruments trained on older cohorts systematically overestimate their risk.
What can be done? New York City has actually been at the forefront of updating its instruments. But beyond that, we need to recognize that the relationships between predictors and outcomes are constantly dynamic. These instruments are doing real damage, and there are ways to build them better.
Gopnik: And cost-benefit analyses have the same problem?
Sampson: Yes. A lot of social programs are touted using cost-benefit projections — “this intervention will save X dollars” — but those projections are often based on experiments conducted on the older, higher-crime cohorts. The estimated benefits simply won’t be as high when applied to younger cohorts who were already less likely to commit crime. That has real implications for government budgeting. If you’re in city government, you should be redoing those analyses using more recent cohorts, or at least weighting them accordingly.
Gopnik: What about incarceration itself as a crime-reduction strategy?
Sampson: A National Academy of Sciences panel concluded that incarceration explains a relatively modest portion of the great American crime decline — perhaps 10% to 15%, and only up to a point. Beyond that point, you’re incarcerating people who are less and less likely to commit crime anyway, and you’re creating collateral consequences — severed social ties, loss of housing, employment barriers — that can make things worse.
The book isn’t primarily about incarceration, but it’s relevant to the argument: The cohorts coming of age now are less likely to be arrested, and therefore less likely to be incarcerated later. The prison population is actually falling off a cliff, even as budgets for correctional facilities continue to be built around the older, higher-crime cohorts. That’s a mismatch with real fiscal consequences.
Gopnik: What intervention addresses the time variable? If when we are born is so central, what do we do about it?
Sampson: I don’t think there’s a magic bullet — and that’s part of the point. It’s a thousand smaller things that add up: community organizations, environmental cleanup, reducing police contacts for low-level behavior, updating our prediction instruments, investing in basic science so we understand what’s actually working.
There’s also a more conceptual point I want to make. We spend enormous energy searching for criminal character in individuals. But what the data suggest is that we should be thinking about the moral accountability of society — what I’d call social character. Are we providing the social structures and informal controls that actually prevent crime? Howard Becker had a wonderful book title: “What About Mozart? What About Murder?” — meaning, what do you say to the sociologist who claims it’s all about social variance? My answer is the same as Becker’s: Murder is wrong. But how we react to it, what counts as crime, who gets arrested for what — all of that varies enormously. The marijuana smoker who would have gone to prison in 1985 walks past five dispensaries today. That’s not a change in human nature. It’s a change in the social world.
The good news is that both the behaviors and the social reactions to them are trending in a positive direction. Young people today are less likely to commit crime, less likely to be arrested and less likely to be incarcerated than their counterparts a generation ago. Understanding why — and building on it — is what this book is really about.
Robert J. Sampson is the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor at Harvard University. His new book is “Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life of Young Americans.” Adam Gopnik is a staff writer at The New Yorker.
