Awards

• Nominated for Otis Dudley Duncan Award 2004
• Nominated for Society for the Study of Social Problems C. Wright Mills Award 2003
• Winner of Albert J. Reiss Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award 2005

Overview

This book analyzes 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 experiences 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 behavior 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.

Full Product Details

9780674019935

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Reviews

There are many important lessons for current crime control discourse and policy that can be gained from this rigorous, sensitive and insightful study. - Robert Reiner, Times Literary Supplement

Author Information

John H. Laub is Professor of Criminology, University of Maryland. Robert J. Sampson is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Harvard University.

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