Robert J. Sampson

I study crime, turning points in people’s lives, and social inequality at Harvard University. Earlier in my career, I taught at the University of Chicago, where in 1995 I helped launch a landmark study that followed children for three decades. My latest book, “Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans,” tells the story of that project and shows how the environments we grow up in and the era when we come of age—the birth lottery of history—shape who we become.