VIC MATUS

Washington Free Beacon

Weekend ///

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peaking of criminal behavior, Manhattan Institute senior fellow and Washington Free Beacon alumnus Charles Fain Lehman reviews Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans by Robert J. Sampson.

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Since its inception as an academic discipline, criminology has concerned itself first and foremost with the question of why people commit crime. Beginning with their earliest research, criminologists gathered extensive data on large groups of people to try to disentangle which variables predicted offending. With sufficiently large samples and adequate measurements, these criminologists thought, they could determine why some people commit lots of crime, while others commit none at all.

“Over time, the discipline has evolved into different schools of thought on this question. To oversimplify, there are two major tendencies. Some criminologists identify the fundamental determinants of criminal behavior as a feature of the criminal himself—a criminal ‘propensity’ or ‘tendency’ or ‘character,’ often with special emphasis placed on self-control as the critical variable. Others argue crime is caused by the criminal’s social or identity status, arguing that intersecting forces like race, class, and wealth determine who is and is not a criminal. (You can guess how these tendencies cash out politically.)

“Marked by Time, the new book from Robert J. Sampson—Harvard sociologist and former president of the American Society of Criminology—is an attempted intervention into this debate. Sampson’s central point is that both sides err by focusing on the unchanging characteristics or situation of the individual. Rather, to understand why some commit crime and others don’t, we should look more carefully at the character of society when a would-be offender hits his peak years for criminal offending.

“The work Sampson did to reach this conclusion—a multi-decade study of thousands of Chicagoans—is impressive. But the reader is left wondering whether his conclusion is a radical one or a truism. That said, whether he intends to or not, Sampson does an excellent job demonstrating why the entire exercise of determining why people commit crimes—the central enterprise of criminology—is essentially misguided.”