What Creates Criminals? | Glenn Loury & Robert J. Sampson | TGS Live

Support The Glenn Show at

Glenn and Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson discuss his new book on how the decade you were born in shapes your life trajectory more powerfully than your individual character. Drawing on a longitudinal study that followed over a thousand children in Chicago from the early 1990s through the 2020s, Sampson presents a striking finding: kids with high self-control born in 1980 were arrested at the same rate as impulsive kids born just ten years later. Same neighborhoods, same poverty, same family structure. They explore what Sampson calls "the birth lottery of history"; why criminal risk algorithms trained on older data overpredict reoffending by up to 90% across all racial groups; and what actually drove the crime decline — roughly half from policing changes, the rest from lead reduction, community organizations, and shifts in youth behavior. Glenn pushes Sampson on whether informal social controls can really substitute for state enforcement, a tension sharpened by Jeffrey Seaman's argument earlier in the stream that under-policing, not over-policing, is the real crisis in Black communities.

Buy Robert's book, "Marked by TimeHow Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans," here