Author Event! Robert J. Sampson's "Marked by Time"

Join us on April 16th at 6pm as we host Robert J. Sampson in conversation with Jennifer Candipan and John Eason to discuss his new book, Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans. Signed copies of the book will be available for purchase!

About the Book:

A leading sociologist’s groundbreaking three-decade study challenges outdated views of crime and character, revealing that traditional risk factors alone poorly predict children’s futures.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 Yet these positive shifts have not registered in public discourse or policies, which continue to rely on outdated studies and reductive narratives of moral character and personal responsibility.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.

About the Author:

Robert J. Sampson teaches at Harvard University, where he is the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor. He is also an Affiliated Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, founding director of the Boston Area Research Initiative, and Scientific Director of the ongoing Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN+). He taught previously at the University of Chicago.

Professor Sampson is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Society of Criminology, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and, as Corresponding Fellow, the British Academy. He is the former President of the American Society of Criminology and in 2011 he received the Stockholm Prize in Criminology.

His research and teaching cover a variety of areas including crime and criminal justice, the life course and social change, neighborhood effects, collective civic engagement, inequality, and urban social structure. He is the author of numerous articles and multiple award-winning books, including Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (2nd edition, 2024), published by the University of Chicago Press. His newest book was published in February 2026 from the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans.

About the Moderators:

Jennifer Candipan is the Stanley J. Bernstein Assistant Professor of Sociology at Brown University and a faculty affiliate at Brown's Population Studies and Training Center, Spatial Structures for the Social Sciences, Annenberg Institute, and Urban Studies Program. In 2019-20, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University.

Her broad research and teaching interests are in stratification, urban sociology, race/ethnicity, and sociology of education. Her work is guided more generally by understanding connections between people and places, with a research agenda that broadly investigates the dynamics of neighborhood and urban change and inequality, as well as how social and spatial contexts, like neighborhoods and schools, shape opportunity and produce racial/ethnic, health, and economic inequality. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Spencer Foundation, National Academy of Education, and Russell Sage Foundation, among others.

John Eason is an associate professor of sociology and international and public affairs at Brown University. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago. Eason, a native of Evanston, Illinois, received a bachelor's degree in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a M.P.P. from the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

Before entering graduate school, Eason was a church-based community organizer focused on housing and criminal justice issues. He also served as a political organizer for then-Illinois State Senator Barack Obama.

Eason's research interests challenge existing models and develop new theories of community, health, race, punishment and rural/urban processes in several ways. First, by tracing the emergence of the rural ghetto, he establishes a new conceptual model of rural neighborhoods. Next, by demonstrating the function of the ghetto in rural communities, he extends concentrated disadvantage from urban to rural community process. These relationships are explored through his book, Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation (University of Chicago Press).