Speaker 1: Hello everyone, and welcome to Talk Nerdy. Today is Monday,
March ninth, twenty twenty six, and I'm the host of
the show, Doctor Kara Santa Maria, And as always, before
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and Joe Wilkinson. Thank you all so much. All right,
let's get into it. This week I had a fascinating
chat and gosh, I just learned an awful lot. I
had the opportunity to speak with doctor Robert J. Sampson.
He's a sociologist and criminologist and the Woodford Ellen Anna
Flowers University Professor at Harvard University. Also the founding director
or a founding director of the Boston Area Research Initiative,
and an affiliated research professor at the American Bar Foundation.
But prior to that, he taught at the University of
Chicago and the University of Illinois. He's won countless awards
and held a lot of really esteemed positions, and a
lot of his research stemmed from the project on human
Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, and we're going to talk about
that at length because of a lot of it informs
his most recent book, which is called Marked by Time,
how social change has transformed crime and the life trajectories
of young Americans. So, without any further ado, here he
is doctor Robert J. Sampson. Well, rob, thank you so
much for joining me today.
Speaker 2: Pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1: So when your book came across my desk, I've been
doing this podcast now for twelve years, I think, and
so I'm at a stage now where even though sometimes
I hear about things and I seek things out, oftentimes
I just I get books from most of the major
publishing houses all the time sent to me, and you know,
books upon books, and I'm often kind of giving them
away to friends and family. Some of them are fastball
down the middle for a science show. Some of them
have absolutely nothing to do with the work we do here.
But more recently I've been getting into talking about social justice.
And actually some of the listeners of the show might
be like, you have a white man on the show.
Whence the last time that happened? But I make exceptions,
especially when I think the content of the conversation is,
you know, just timely and incredibly important. So when your
book came across my desk, I was like, oh, wow,
this is a topic I don't think we've ever really
talked about on the show except sort of biting around
the edges. And as a psychologist, this is, you know,
deeply interesting to me. So I want to get into
first kind of your academic path. That's what I usually
like to do, to figure out how you became expert
in these areas of inquiry. So you're, yeah, this is
I love interdisciplinary work. What would you say your actual
I mean, what department are you in?
Speaker 2: Even so, I'm in the department of so sociology, but Okay,
I've always considered myself a social scientist, right, So I
have studied psychology, law, criminology, sociology, but I do come
at things really from a sociological background, but in an
interdisciplinary way.
Speaker 1: And so has that been your course the whole time? Like,
did you actually get sociology undergraduate and graduate degrees, get
appointments in sociology departments, but you were always curious about
these other things? Or did you jump around and have
kind of a meandering path to.
Speaker 2: Get to Oh, definitely meandering actually from the beginning. I
mean I grew up in upstate New York, in a
declining city, and there was all kinds of changes going
around me that until actually I didn't quite understand at
the time, and I really didn't plan an academic background
at all. Fact, most of my friends went into a
very different path. And it really wasn't until I got
into graduate school that I became hooked, as it were,
on the ideas about crime and justice and social change.
And in fact, the program that I went through as
a graduate student, which was basically, to admit it, I mean,
sort of random, because I was just bumming around the
country for a year after undergraduate and I really just
stumbled on this program an hour and a half where
I was living at the time, and it was an
interdisciplinary department. Was actually an experiment that was started in
the late sixties because crime was a hot topic that
reincreases in the sixties and the seventies, the turmoil that
was hitting the country, and so they brought together psychology, lawyers, sociologists, criminologists,
you name it, into this graduate program. And this was
at the State University of New York at all of
any and I was a New York kid through and
through undergraduate public education, and I was deciding between that
and Cornell and the sociology of science. Don't ask me why.
It doesn't really add up. But once I got there,
as I said, I just got hooked because crime is
such a fascinating topic, and I do think you have
to consider it from multiple angles. Although I had, I
guess in retrospect, I would say sort of a latent
tendency to view things from a more macro or sociological
perspective as opposed to just focusing on the individual, because
I took a lot of In fact, I think it
was sort of a joint psychology and sociology concentrator as
an undergraduate.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I mean in so many ways, you can't
have one without the other. You cannot understand an individual
perspective without understanding the culture that shaped that individual. And
you really can't understand culture without understanding at least something
about how the brain works and you know, behavior relationships.
I I got to tell you, it's so timely, and
this is going to feel like untimely that I mentioned this,
but my partner and I literally just watched We Own
This City, the David Simon Show on HBO, which is, yeah,
all about the Baltimore corruption and the police department and
you know, a lot of kind of confusion around a
fallen officer, and you know, we talked a lot about
the wire and a lot of the kind of really
fascinating ways that that show showed these multiple angles that
allowed you to start to develop a nuanced macro view
of criminology. I'm curious, do you feel like, do you
feel like the media on the whole, and how do
you even describe the media on the whole has completely
skewed our understanding of crime?
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, in many ways, I think the media is
always sort of hyper focused on crime. It seems like
with all the news about crime, it's almost like it's
always increasing. At least that is sort of the perception
that people have, and part of that is fed by
the news. Although to give credit where credit is due,
I think recently there has been more attention paid to
the dramatic drops in crime since the pandemic. But yeah,
I think it's definitely skewed, and so are I think
the political approaches to crime, because they're rooted, in my view,
in sort of that particularistic view of crime being rooted
in individual conditions, the who we are, as I put
it in the book, and as you say, even though
we recognize that the world is always changing, it's sort
of a paradox because yes we do. But on the
other hand, we judge people outside of time all the time,
and so it's almost like a puzzle. Actually, is the
way I was thinking about it, And it goes back, actually,
you know, way back. It's almost a philosophical question. I
quoted Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher at the beginning on
the idea that no man steps into the same river twice,
where it's not the same river and it's not the
same man. I mean, individuals in society are changing together,
and what we typically do is to split them apart.
We look at individuals and tend to rest our assumptions
in our theories on the qualities of the individuals, their families,
and their immediate backgrounds. Sociologists tend to focus more on
the macrol but at the level of looking at let's say,
changes at the societal level over time, almost leaving out
the individual. So it's that intersection or interaction of individuals'
lives with societal change. That's what I really was after.
Speaker 1: And I think that's why I can't help but go
back to that paradigm that I guess or maybe that
insight that I developed when I was much younger watching
the Wire for this first time and like I felt, so,
I guess it was an awakening moment for me because
it was one of the first times that there was
a fictionalized, dramatized, entertaining experience that that touched on a
lot of those different layers to our criminal justice system
and to the human experience as it relates to crime.
And I mean, I'm curious what your take is on
maybe like the accuracy or the the you know whether
you saw that as something that was a boon for
Americans to experience and learn from, or whether you were like, ooh,
that sent us back or something. But it did to
me at least feel like a dramatized version of perhaps
even some of the work that you do.
Speaker 2: Yes, I love the Wire.
Speaker 1: Oh good, Okay.
Speaker 2: In fact, I was turned onto it by my colleague
here who has now retired, the great sociologist William Julilist Wilson,
who wrote The Truly Disadvantage. He actually taught a course
on the Wire here at Harvard or not. So. Yeah,
it was important because it captured the times in very
powerful and poignant way. And it wasn't just the criminal
justice system, right, It was the grinding poverty, it was
the racism. It was Baltimore at that time. And I think,
in a way, I'm glad you brought it up. It
sort of captures a framing of the book is Chicago,
at least certain parts of Chicago were not all that
different at the time. I start out the book just
using the example of two individuals from our study, Darnell
and Andrea, both pseudonyms, of course, and I talk about
how Darnell was born in the mid nineties, and that
was just after the peak or around the peak of
violence in Chicago. Murder rates were hitting a really high level.
The Chicago trib was running a series and killing our children.
A seven year old was shot and killed walking hand
in hand with his mother to school. It just ripped
the city apart. And I was there at the time
and everyone was just stunned, and you would have thought,
this kid is in trouble, right, But as soon as
he was born, more or less, the world started changing dramatically.
Violence plummeted. Arrest rates when he was in his adolescence
were plummeting drug arrests, in particular disorder arrests. And I
compare that to another person, Andre was born around nineteen eighty,
who was coming of age in the crack epidemic and
hit his early adolescence during that very peak of violence
in Chicago. The key, though, is that they were both
the same race, they both were raised by a single
mother on welfare, they both lived in a high disadvantage neighborhood.
So analytically, that got me to thinking, and really that's
the way I would sort of capture the analytic approach
of the book. It's sort of a counterfeit counterfactual approach, actually,
which is to say, what if otherwise identical individuals we're
exposed to these radical environments that shape their lives. In
other words, they came of age in very distinct social worlds.
And if that's the case, then it can't be that
it well, you know, it's Darnell's poverty level, ors family,
or even his self control or temperament or personality. I
try to separate those things out, and that's the idea
of the interaction of the individual with social change. And
I was able to do that given the design of
the study, which I think is relatively unique in the
social sciences.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so talk to us about that, because I know
that this study is or at least your investigations on
Chicago have been a large part of your career and
a lot of your publications have come out of this.
So talk to us about sort of the development of
this study, how long you were doing it, and what
you know the research questions were.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it feels like I was too long. It started
actually in the late eighties early nineties. I was a
faculty member at the University of Chicago starting in the
early nineties, just a fabulous institution in Chicago is a
fabulous city. But as I noted earlier, at the time,
it was really being roiled by these kinds of challenges
when it came to the concentration of poverty, to violence,
to children being killed, racist, criminal justice behaviors, you name it.
And so part of the rationale for the study was
trying to make sense of all this. And this was
a large effort that involved multiple institutions and multiple disciplines,
so psychiatry, psychology, law. It was really a started out
as a study group funded by the MacArthur Foundation, which
then built up into this larger study. To make a
long story short, we started data collection after a lot
of planning in the mid nineties and enrolled over six
thousand children and their caretakers or parents. But the key
analytic piece of that which differed from most other studies
is that we created Woodstone as a sequential cohort design,
but put into planar English. We enrolled multiple age cohorts,
starting with infants, so we'd rolled women were in their
pregnancy or early childhood let's say up to about six
months or so on average, spaced out every three years
up to eighteen years old. So in other words, we
had multiple cohorts zero to eighteen, and then we followed
each cohort in detail over the same period of time
over well now it's been almost thirty years now. We
didn't follow every child. We couldn't afford to do so
because it was such a large scale study, so we
sampled as we went into the further data collection. But
it was original data collection on these children that were
coming age of in terms of different times. So you
can imagine someone turning fifteen, for example, in nineteen ninety
five versus two thousand and five. And we didn't know
I would emphasize this at the time. We did not
envision who could have known, right, It's the whole point.
You can't predict the future that there would be these
vast social changes. So it wasn't really until recently that
we could piece this all together.
Speaker 1: Did you anticipate that you would be collecting data for
this long? Absolutely not into it, Like how long did
you think this kind of longitudinal study would last?
Speaker 2: Well, you know, four or five six years. It mean,
it's really hard. And as I said, let me just
give you an example. So there were multiple investigators principal investigators.
At one point we hired something like one hundred and
twenty people were on staff, entered up building in Chicago,
we were collecting data, We hired survey firms. It was
just a huge operation. It was exhausting, frankly, and it
was designed to last again about three waves of data,
which is five to six years. And then it kind
of went in hiatus for a bit, and it wasn't
until about twenty twelve that I came back to it
with fresh eyes, and especially given the changes that had
ensued over that period of time, the Great Recession happened
a few years earlier. Along with another colleague, we saw
funding and said, wouldn't it be a great idea if
we went back to these kids. It's a unique design.
Let's see where they are today. And that was hard too,
because when you go back and try to find kids
after that many years, it's a challenge. But we did that,
and then we interviewed them again, and then we matched
them up with different kinds of records in terms of
mortality and crime, childhood, exposure to lead and so forth.
And so it was not anticipated to be honest, and
in fact, it's sort of kind of a paradox in
the sense of expectations, because the original design statisticians thought, well,
this is cool, we have kids from zero to eighteen
in six years, we can look at the life course
from age zero to approximately twenty five. We'll just stch
it together. But that assumes that the world and change, right,
So it was like it was an eye opener. But
it took a while really to envision all that. And
so yeah, that's why I've been working on it for someone.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's incredible. Is this sort of overarching approach then,
or at least was it at the time. Obviously it's
been changing as you've as you've analyzed data and you've
you've started to ask new questions. But was the real
question kind of which variables matter when it comes to
I guess myriad outcomes for these kids living in Chicago, Yes,
which variables affect which outcomes?
Speaker 2: Yes? So I think the predominant view of the study was, well,
this will allow us to look at the different risk factors,
if I can put it that way. The risk factor
paradigm is quite prominent in the social sciences. It looks
at things like vitual family structure, poverty, the personality of
the child and so forth, and that's important. In fact,
you go back earlier in my career, I started out
with a longitude and a life course study of kids
here in Boston that were born in another really interesting
historical era, mainly the Depression era of the United States,
that were born here in Boston, and we ended up
following them for a very long time too, but they
were from the same cohort, and my research was focused
on things like family structured and family supervision, and as
they got older, looking at things like schooling, work, employment,
marriage as a turning point in the life course. We've
looked at military service as a turning point for crime.
In other words words, does getting married lead to a
drop in crime or just going into the military lead
to a drop in crime or an increase. So it
was that sort of focus and that's I think a
large part of focus of life course research, psychological research,
developmental research. And I'm not criticizing that at all. I mean, damn,
I've done.
Speaker 1: It, but yeah, I mean, yeah, it sounds like nearly
impossible even to do a study like that. And then
with the realization that you know, the cleaner the study, right,
that the cleaner the results very often, and I see
this all the time in the sciences when we talk
about gold standard research or we talk about you know,
a kind of outcome studies that set the standard for
how policy is spoken about. But very often, I worry,
at least I see this in psychology quite a lot.
The reason, for example, that CBT is the gold standard
treatment is because it's easy to test, you know what
I mean. It's like, of course, things that are easier
to do in the lab and easier to show a
significant you know, outcome are going to be the things
that are then integrated more readily into treatment or into policy.
But the problem is that's not really you know, effectiveness research, Like,
that's not how the world works. And once you actually
start to look at the variables that fundamentally, you know,
all of those moderating and mediating variables that fundamentally change outcomes,
and it starts to get really, really messy. I think
a lot of people are like, Okay, that's above my
pay grade, and that's why we don't see that kind
of research very often.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And the sort of
the randomized clinical trials experimental paradigm is dominant in terms
of policy. There's a lot to be said for it.
As you know, it sure allows for causal identification of
a particular but if you think about it, it's like, Okay,
there's all these individualized interventions, but it's it's assuming kind
of a static world, right, yes, And to the extent
that the world is changing, then we may not be
making the right inferences. I mean, take the Perry Preschool Project,
which was a famous experiment and a wonderful one, but
you know, those kids came of age in a very
particular world. I think a lot of the assumptions that
we make in these studies are are problematic because there's
temporal heterogenety. Like a lot of people worry about experiments.
Well this worked in Baltimore, Will it work in Chicago?
That's an important question. But I'm more interested in, well,
will it work tomorrow?
Speaker 1: Right? And that worked like Obama's America? Will it work
in Trump's America.
Speaker 2: It's shifting the question. I don't want to and I
do not in any way denigrate those approaches. I'm asking
a different kind of question. I'm sort of flipping the script.
And it even has to do with interventions again. At
the individual level. Let's take you know, a lot of
approaches nowadays are looking at sort of behavioral interventions and
trying to get people to think slower, and we talk
about self control, and I think that's all well and fine,
and in fact of my data, I show that kids
with low self control are much more likely to be arrested.
But we can ask a different question and say, well,
what is the manifestation of something like low self control
in the future when we compare different birth courts. When
we do that, what I found was that the high
self control kids of one cohort, the earlier cohorts from
the eighties, had essentially the same arrest rates as the
low self control kids of the later cohorts. So, in
other words, the rates of crime were in a sense
equated over time, which means that the manifestations are the
predictions that we might make about kids with low self
control are dependent on the historical context. To me, that's
just a different way of thinking. It's not to say
it's unimportant as a construct, but it's.
Speaker 1: Not the whole truth.
Speaker 2: It's not the whole truth. It's fundamentally different. I mean,
let's look at today. I mean, violence is just dropping dramatically.
Is that because, I mean, self control has changed that much.
I don't think so.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would, and I would venture to guess that actually,
the sort of quick attention economy that most people are
living in is affecting our self control in the opposite direction.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I wonder if today people are much less capable of
sitting quietly with their own thoughts, of regulating their emotions
than they were historically when they didn't have a million
distractions at their fingertips.
Speaker 2: That's right. It could even be that there's massively less
self control. But yet crime is going down.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, crime.
Speaker 2: It's just another point that you can't go from the
individual level to make predictions at the societal level in
a clean and neat way. And so that's what the
book is trying to do, is just you know, it's
like a laser focus on one particular idea which I
happen to think is important. It's not to throw out
that other stuff, but hey, we really need to zero
in on it.
Speaker 1: And so that's why I mean, the book is called
Marked by Time, right, how societal change has transformed crime
and the life trajectories of young Americans. And so when
you do studies like this. You can look at your
findings and you can say, oh, it's so interesting. At
this time these people had these outcomes and at that time,
those people had those outcomes. But what's sometimes hard with
this kind of research, and I think what a lot
of people are like champing at the bit to understand
is why, like what is the actual driving variable underneath.
It's one thing to say this is what we see.
It's another thing to make inferences about why we see that.
And so I'm really curious how you connect those dots,
not just for the reader in the book, but you know,
in all of the publications that you've been engaged with
and all of the you know, academic scholarship that you've
been engaged with throughout this study, are you able to
sort of comfortably say, we think this is why these
are some of the outcomes that we've found.
Speaker 2: I think we can make some reasonable arguments, and that's
what I try to do, because you're absolutely right, you're
going to make the argument that when we are is
as important as who we are, and that's exactly what
I do. We need to know something about the when,
and so we can't do an experiment and think goes
back to your earlier point, particularly when it comes to
history when it comes to social change, so you have
to work differently, and you know, to put it in
simple terms, what I do is to try to work
like a detective and look at the different things that
were changing over this period of time, but importantly at
distinct ages that are important for child development. So, in
other words, when each of these cohorts when they were
turning let's say early adolescens or eighteen or early adulthood,
what was going on in society at the time. And
I spent an entire chapter looking at that more macro
level change and then integrating it with the individual change,
and we can rule out certain things. Right, So I
look at factors like, well, was it police for size?
I mean, there's a lot of literature saying well we
need more police or police for capita. Well, it turns
out that was relatively flat across the entire p period.
So logically that can't explain the changes drug use, for example,
we also looked at patterns, and again relatively flat. I
mean there's fluctuations, I go up and down, but the
line of drug use just does not align with drug arrests,
which dropped almost ninety percent. Think about that. So the
andres of the world that kids were born in the
early eighties, you know, they were unlucky in a dramatic way,
whereas the other or later cohorts had a totally different
experience or you know, smoking a joint on the street
or roughing it up, that's what kids do, totally different.
And so it's not so much driven by that behavior
of drug use. It was driven by policing policy changes. Similarly,
I looked at employment and poverty, and those things can't
explain it, and I basically argue that there's sort of
two higher order factors, and then I can break it
down a little bit. But about half, I mean this
is not an exact decomposition, but about half is due
to policing changes, So sort of the collapse of warrior
policing in Chicago, that is to say, the decline and
drug arrest decline and public disorder arrests that combined with
i'd say overtime, I mean, it gets not linear. They're
stopping frisk and there were some fluctuations, but the trends
were toward less aggressive policing overall, and I would argue
I think better policing, better data, more community policing. So
that's sort of the policy change when it comes to policing.
But then there's the broad scale social changes. I think
that you might have been getting it, and I sort
of lumped them into four or five buckets. One, it's
that sort of larger urban revieviation that took place throughout America.
Cities changed really quite dramatically in terms of improvement. There
was increases in immigration, which conorintuitively, I argue may have
led to reductions in vacancy and even reductions in crime rates.
That was an important social change.
Speaker 1: Another one only counterintuitive in today's America.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, I know historically. Yeah, yes, indeed that's a
new threat if you will, because the Ice, let's say,
aggressive interventions in places like Minneapolis. To me, that's replaying
the script U rampant immigrant criminality, which I looked back.
I actually wrote a up at of New York Times
in two thousand and six, and at that time there
was this kind of panic about immigrant criminality, and there
were there was a legislation that was being put forth,
and I wrote, but I've been This was based on
an article from this Chicago study saying well, wait a minute, folks.
First generation immigrants in our study have lower rates a
violence by quite a bit. And if you look at
the macro level trends, immigration was going up as crime
was going down. So again, in that detective like fashion,
you can say, well, this argument just isn't holding water.
So that's enough example of how you can piece together
what the mechanisms are.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so more immigration in these cities, as you mentioned before,
kind of went hand in hand with revitalization, with jobs
being filled, with vacancies being filled, with more community engagement,
and all of these things are mechanisms that can help
drive down crime.
Speaker 2: Community engagement, for sure, I agree with that. In fact,
there's good evidence from other scholars that increases in community
based organizations, especially for young people, both nonprofits for example
that support kids and after school programs and employment and
so forth, were associated with the drop in crime. This
was based a very sophisticated study. In other words, communities
were fighting back I'll put it that way when crime
is going up, and they had an effect on reducing crime.
So that's another mechanism that I talk about in the
book in terms of what we need to do is
as a society it's not all about policing. In fact,
my entire career really has been an argument that informal
social controls and community based social controls are central. People
are not committing crime because there's a police officer on
the block, because there's usually not right there time and society.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And also putting a police officer on the block
is not the only deterrent to cry, you know, it's community.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the grandmother on the corner who yells at the kids,
who are you know, making a ruckus? That's a form
of social control. And I think we underplay that, and
we underplay other things like clean environments. The good actually
going to experiments. There's really good evidence from researchers at
pen and other places that did these really neat randomized
trials where they cleaned up vacant lots. And you would think, well,
what the hell does that have to do with crime? Well,
if you think about it, when you have a cleaner, safer, greener,
more appealing environment than people venture out into those spaces
that they were formally fearful of, then they socially interact
with one another and then there's more eyes on the street.
Is the great urbanist Jane Jacobs would have put it,
and that is another mechanism that leads to lower crimes
so well.
Speaker 1: And they also feel proud, you know, they feel proud
of their neighborhoods, sure, and they engage in a way
that is protective when you have ownership over something, when
it doesn't feel like that's for others. I think that
can have a massive impact. And you know, I've long
believed and again this is a psychological perspective because I
am a psychologist, but I think it's informed by these
larger social forces. I worry sometimes that when we look
and I'm taking this on a little tangent, but I
want to come back to these five things that you mentioned.
I worry sometimes that when we look at kind of
criminal behavior, we we moralize. It's it's just a tendency
that we do as a culture, you know. And and
like you said, we put the onus on the individual,
and we often want things to be simple and easy
and say that person did that thing because that person
is bad, or because that person is evil, or because
that person, you know, is lacking a conscience. But it
is very hard for me to think in those parameters,
and and I've long believed that when people engage in
activity that is like antisocial or you know, deemed to
be criminal, it's very often done out of a feeling
of let's call it desperation. That people have a need,
you know, whether we're talking about murder rates as related
to you know, drug activity, whether we're talking about grand theft,
whether we're talking about all these different types of things rape.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that people don't do bad things. Of course,
a lot of people do bad things, but when you
get into the psychology, it's a very small percentage of
people who actually have antisocial personality disorder, who actually are
sort of have psychopathy. I think most people commit crimes
because they feel like that was the best path they
could take at that time.
Speaker 2: That's right, and that has a lot to do with
the context at the time. I think it is true
that we typically view character as this sort of immutable
core of our personality that defines who we are. And yeah,
it has a distinctly moral dimension. If you even go
back to some of the great philosophical texts, you'll see
references to character being defined as a criminal act or
a criminal record, and moreover, that sense of the criminal
character is rooted in this idea of a stable propensity,
and I spent a lot of time in the book
actually on theories of propensity and character and show that
even though we're not supposed to, like in the legalists,
for example, character is smuggled in really at pretty much
every stage of the criminal justice system, whether it's a
cop on the street assuming the sort of moral character
of an individual based on their demeanor, looks, or a
dress or whatever, to sentencing decisions. It's all wrapped up
with this idea that, well, you have a criminal record,
you're a criminal. But as we've been talking, hopefully you
know the listener can see that, well, that criminal record
has history baked into it, and therefore if you're making
decisions be out based on that, then you're sort of
falling into a trap. It's actually what I call the
character trap, because if let's say we deny someone bail,
we deny someone a job because of a criminal record,
or an apartment based on a credential check, then in
a sense we're blocking the very opportunities, the very social
ties that prevent crime in the first place. Vicious cycle
that's self reinforcing, hence.
Speaker 1: A negative feedback loop that I think drives inequality. And
you know, I often will call that criminalizing poverty, but
that probably isn't a robust enough description because it's not,
As you've mentioned so well here, it's not just about poverty.
We don't. We criminalize social standing and opportunity or lack
of opportunity. And what ends up happening is that you
can't then extricate racism, you can't then extricate classism. You know,
these very foundational views that were baked in, not just
baked in, but they were the the engine for like
eugenics policy early on. I shouldn't even say early, It
wasn't that long ago that that is really what we
are talking about. Like when we looked at early eugenics
literature and and sort of political stances here in the US,
and then of course exporting out to even places like
Nazi Germany, the argument was a was one that most
people could get behind. It was we want you know, healthy,
clean babies, and we want streets that are free of crime.
And people were like, that's great, we want that too.
How are we going to achieve it? Well, these people
over here tend to be criminals, so they shouldn't reproduce,
they shouldn't have access to these you know, services, and
blah blah blah. Those people over there are of a
good ilk right, like they're they're the right kinds of
people to be involved in society, I mean. And that
just pervades everything.
Speaker 2: Oh it does. And I think if you look at
it historically, different groups have come into that. I mean,
if you look at immigrant groups. In the earlier part
of the twentieth century, like here in Boston, Irish and
Italian immigrants were badly mistreated by the police, for example,
racism in terms of rmal justice system in regard to
African Americans, the same kind of thing, especially in the
era of rising mass incarceration. It was almost as if
blackness was equated with criminality. And that's another kind of
way that people are making these links or assumed links
with either a categorical group identity let's say, whether it's
race or could be poverty, low income individuals of all races,
or the sort of more psychological view which as well,
these are just you know, low moral, anti social, low
self control kids that are kind of written off. To
be honest, I mean, the whole idea of anti social
or psychopathy, or let's not forget the images that are
constantly conjured up right, the super predators. I mean that
whole idea. You can't really get to that unless you
have a deeply sort of individualized view of the immorality
of individual offenders.
Speaker 1: And of course that protects I think that the consciousness
of those who have a privileged position in society, of
those who are the ones who are developing policy and
who you know, have their finger on the social control buttons,
because it says, well that I'm never going to be that.
I'm not built that way. That person is built that way,
and they're going to constantly be engaging in this kind
of stuff. And maybe we can rehab them a little
and you know, do some things that keep them from
being the worst of the worst, but ultimately that's just
how they are. But me over here, I could never
be that. And it's like, you know, it's like the
old adage, like all of us are like a bad
week away from homelessness. We are not a good week
away from billionaire status. We just aren't.
Speaker 2: Right. Therefore, the grace of God go I. But I
think that's right, and you can think about it in
this context as again, that sort of historical era is
an important piece of that. Like you said, one hundredople
they are making policies, they just have a hard time
imagining what it would have been like to be a kid,
for example, in Baltimore during the you know, let's assume
the wire is capturing it in inaccurate way during those times,
or on the South side of Chicago in nineteen ninety three,
when you know, violence was just an epidemic Levels or Washington,
d C. Or any number of cities in the United States.
Speaker 1: And it's so important this template that you mentioned, or
this understanding of this temporal and dynamic temporal experience, because
I find myself, I mean, I'm a human being and
I fall into these traps too. I was born in
nineteen eighty three. I grew up in Exis, lived in
New York, lived in now I've been in LA for
quite some time. You know. I think about the formative
experiences I had. I think about Columbine when I was
in high school. I think about nine to eleven, when
my first year of college. I think about, you know,
where I was in life when all these big things happened.
And I think about what the streets of the different
towns that I spent time in looked like I think
about how the wire is relevant to me because that
was my youth. No, I didn't grow up in Boston.
In Boston, and I didn't experience the things that those
kids experienced, but that was the time that I was
a child, you know. And so when I think about policy,
I can't help but view it through the lens of
somebody who was born in nineteen eighty three, whereas some
of the people who are in power now are viewing
it through a lens of people who lived during you know,
post War boom, or through a lens of wherever they
came from. And it's hard for any of us to
imagine what sort of like Trump's gilliad or would look
like for women, for example. Oh yeah, yeah, it's really
tough to do because that's not our experience.
Speaker 2: That's right. It's hard to get out of that. In fact,
there's a venerable tradition in the social sciences that speaks
exactly to that that I talk about in the book.
I mean you go back. Actually there's a Carl Mannheim
was a great sociologist, wrote about generations and collective memories,
and he and others talk about sort of critical ages
and roughly ages, you know, eighteen to twenty five. It
is interesting you mentioned when things happen that sort of
are seared into your memory. This is true across all ages.
There's fascinating work that shows. For example, if you ask
people even up till you know, whatever, eighty years of age,
everyone tends to mention events that happened within the same
age range.
Speaker 1: So yeah, they also listen to music from that era too.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah music. Yeah, yeah, there's a want to get
into it. Let's stop music. No, it's true. And so
those formative years at the sort of coming of age,
when you link that to that specific historical context, it's
not even just one thing. That's why the I think
the sort of experimental logic goes awry, because it's a
constellation of factors that were happening when you were let's say,
in late high school or college years, and it's that
interaction of that age with those social changes, and we
can say what they were, and we can make, as
I try to do in the book, reasonable assumptions about
well this is more important than that. But there is
no one magic bullet, just like there is not an individual,
and the real challenge again, as I see it, is
to try to piece together the individual of the macro.
And it's just really damn hard to do absolutely.
Speaker 1: I mean, as you mentioned a perfect example I mentioned
and I mentioned nine to eleven. When I was in
early grad school, I was, you know, canvassing for Obama.
I was, you know, and all of these things feel
like formative experiences for me personally, but in the culture,
just the massive change that happened, for example, when we
had the Obama era, the massage societal change, the amount
of hope, the amount of But then what policy changes
were actually you know, interact in which ones are enacted
and which ones weren't. We go back to those big
things that you identified in the book, and I want
to make sure that we come back to them. One
of the things that you mentioned was this change in
policing from a more sort of aggressive, militarized, you know,
overtly racist and like kind of lack of probable cause
style policing to more community building and maybe I shouldn't
say back to but at least an integration of protect
and serve. But how much of that is really just
tied to the fact that the drug We lost the
drug war, and people started to recognize this is, you know,
as long as there's a war on drugs, that means
we're at war with our own citizens. And these outcomes
that we're seeing here, this high crime, this you know,
not just high crime, but like high murder rates, right,
like actual detriment to public health. How much of that
was just tied to a sort of collective understanding that
this concept of the drug war and this framing of
how we are going to police is it's just not working.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's an important part of it. I
think there was a recognition not across the board, but
right the importantly in a lot of places that that
was a mistake and that we started the backtrack on that,
not at the same pace in every city. In New
York City, for example, stop and frisk at a really
insane level into the twenty ten and so forth, which
we didn't see so much in Chicago, but that dropped
there eventually too. And so yes, I think pleasing improved,
but I wouldn't put all my eggs in that basket
in the following sense that one of the key lessons
I think in the book is that social change, right
it's not linear and things can change on a dime.
And what I worry about is the fact that by
conjuring up these these images from the past, we often
revert back to these mistakes. Right we're fighting the last war. So,
I mean, the ice invasion really in Minneapolis, I think
is really problematic. I mean, it's obviously problematic in terms
of the violence, but in terms of leading to more
mistrust and alienation, particularly of youth. The artisicmal justice system.
I see a setback here, and that's really worrisome because
to the extent you have distrust in the police, then
people don't report crimes to the police, which then is
another kind of vicious cycle which can lead to more crime.
And what's interesting is that even police chiefs, or at
least many police chiefs, are against what's happening there because
they feel like there were gains made, there was more
trust in the communities now being undermined. So it's not
guaranteed that crime is going to continue to go down
or who knows what's going to happen.
Speaker 1: Oh, I think it's almost guaranteed that it's going to
go up based on I mean, that's my big concern
about because this, as you mentioned, there's one thing. When
you look at these sort of slow, steady changes over time,
and a big longitudinal study like this that allows you
to have multiple cohorts, you can see nuanced changes even
if things are happening slow, but it's always going to
be punctuated with these massive dramatic shifts that occur when
you know there's an authoritarian regime, or that occur when
there's like like a massive recession or some sort of
horrific natural disaster, a pandemic for example. Those things don't.
Speaker 2: Exactly that hit us all right, with everyone unaware, And
the youngest cohort actually in the book that I study
was lucky in most ways in terms of arrests in
many forms of violence. But when they were in their
late teens early adultho, they were bumping up against that
chaos of the pandemic and George Floyd and the unrest
spike and gun violence, and so in certain respects they
were unlucky. It goes back to that what happens when
you're eighteen to twenty five, and so that sort of
leads to that imprint in terms of how people are
experiencing the world. So you know, going back to let's
say Minneapolis, the youth in particular, I think are going
to be the most affected by that, not limited to
that group, but I think that's the real worry about
the kinds of the gains that have been made and
the setbacks that we're seeing. So hopefully, you know, we
can get back on track. And the good news is
that violence is down pretty dramatically. Most crimes are down,
so it is almost as if we're sort of reverting
back to the pre pandemic era that that was this blip,
a massive blip in terms of this rupture in the
social structure which led to all kinds of alienation, to
increases in violence and accidents, you know, sort of a
multitude of factors which are now for the most part,
tending to recede. So that's why we need to take
both the long view but also look at these punctuated
large events like the pandemic, like nine to eleven, like
the Great Recession, like the drug war. And again that's
what I do, and in fact, one of the graphs
in the book, I try to piece together all the
major events, including political administrations and changes in that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I've long believed that sort of because of
the in this again back to a psychological framing, because
of the way that we perceive time, and the way
that we perceive the time that existed before us and
the time that may exist after us. I think there's
a tendency, almost like a psychological bias to maximize the
impact of history of Oh, that happened back then, and
things were really different then, things were really weird. That
was a really intense thing. But right now this is
just my life, and I think that that framing shitt
We are living in history. All of these things that
we are experiencing are shaping outcomes for as you mentioned,
you know, months, years, decades, generations to come, the children
who are experiencing the social pressures or you know, this
myriad kind of variables right now that's going to affect
how they govern in the future, or how they vote,
or how they engage with their neighbors. And so that
temporal component of it. Not only is it so important
to look at it sort of academically, sort of cognitively,
it's also I think important to constantly relate ourselves back
to it. We are not somehow separate from time.
Speaker 2: That's absolutely right, and that's in a way, if you
think about projecting into the future, another advantage of sort
of Cohork way of thinking. It's not all only that
kids are differentiated by these social changes at the time,
but they are going to then age right in two
later years with those experiences formative in their minds, and
all the events that shape where they are will influence
future policy. And that's what we think of in terms
of Cohort replacement. And so what about the kids that
are eighteen to twenty five now when they are in
positions of policy when they're forty, or the people that
are in positions of power now. I think that's a
really central insight of the Cohort way of thinking that
really tells us what's going to or at least the
important features for the future. And part of the problem
here too is that we really have trouble I think
updating our mental models of the world almost like a
cognitive bias, which I another way of kind of getting
to what you were saying. That's what I think of
it as that we tend to again revert back to
that imprint in our brains.
Speaker 1: Really it's an anchor point for us. So yeah, it's naturally,
we all do it totally. So everything we experience, Yes,
I am alive today in twenty twenty six, but everything
is being compared to those you know, sort of late
teenage years or whatever, the experiences you were having at
that time. Whether I felt safer than than I do now,
Oh things have gotten worse, or whether I felt less
safe than oh things are more stable in life, you know,
like we're always anchoring back to that sort of inflection
point in our lives. And I see it. I guess
I've gained insight into this, and that's why this this
conversation is so exciting for me, because you're kind of
sharing this evidence based description of something that I feel
like lately. As I'm a psycho therapist, I'm a clinical
psychologist in a cancer center, which means that I work
primarily with gerontological patients, although I do see some pediatric
patients and some kind of you know, patients in middle age.
Who gets cancer? You know, we all get cancer the
older we get That's sort of the way life works.
And I just have this beautiful opportunity to get in
to do deep therapy with people who have lived really long,
rich lives, and it's fascinating learning about their perspectives. You know,
somebody who's anchor point was in you know, nineteen sixty
eight and that was their formative year, or somebody who's
anchor point, you know, it's it's fascinating to see their
worldview and their perspective throughout these different I guess you
could call them cohorts as well.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, yeah, do that enough, Yeah, to sort of
get into their sense of time and how it's experienced
across these different ages and going back to sort of
the earlier conversations. That's how a lot of research is
problematic because if you just look at one cohort, basically
you're aging and the societal changes that are happening are simultaneous,
so they're.
Speaker 1: Happening in the background, you don't notice it, Yeah.
Speaker 2: And so therefore disentangling them that's really the key. So
you need to separate that out. And that's why looking
at the different coorts at these different points, even though
they're the same ages at different historical points, it's like
another way of seeing the world. That's how I think
of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it is, and it reminds me of
you know, it's a way that you've probably heard this before,
but a lot of at least academics and psychology and
probably in sociology too, will often refer to things like
patriarchy or things like sort of these background social pressures
that really affect literal everything, but you don't notice them
because we often will say it's the water we swim in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, swimming in water.
Speaker 1: Yeah you don't notice it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, that's I mean, that's how I feel about
these changes like the air we breathe. It's like, yeah,
it's okay, we all know it's changing, but I'm just
gonna go on acting the way that they normally do.
And again, judge people outside of the time.
Speaker 1: Right right, and we just, yeah, we cannot do that.
And I think this sort of a last point that
I think is important to bring up. We do have
to judge people in time, and I think historians do
a brilliant job of that. But sometimes I think there's
an apologetic way that we judge individuals based on time,
Like we can also take it too far, and I
will often see this when I talk to older adults
in my life who are sort of apologizing for bad
behavior of you know, let's say, gross men or bad
behavior of grandparents who aren't, you know, understanding progressive movements
of their of their kids' kids, And they'll say, oh,
but they're from a different era and they just and
I'm like, yeah, but it was still bad then, you know,
like racism was still bad even when it was acceptable
in the public to be overtly racist, and there were
always people in those cohorts who weren't and who were
fighting against it and who had, you know, a perspective
that maybe wasn't normative. But now looking back on the
sort of moral arc of history we see was just
and I think we have to remember that as well.
We are products of our time, but we are not
victims of our time.
Speaker 2: No. It's another way to think about it is that
there's a lot of heterogeneity within the cohorts.
Speaker 1: So absolutely, yeah, yeah, it's.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just a way of capturing the historical experiences
that each cohort is growing up with. But and I
say this in the book, I mean, in no way
am I arguing against individual response onsibility or even arguing
against the idea of punishment. It's more that, well, we
have to place it in context, and these are some
of the characteristics we have to take into account, and
that has pragmatic implications, like, for example, the drug war,
we now know that in large part that was a mistake.
So commuting the sentences, for example, of people who were
locked up for smoking marijuana. When you can walk into
a marijuana store I have won, you know, four blocks
from my house, it's like a weird experience, like wait
a minute, you just go in and bipop, there's people
in prison an earlier point. So we can say, well,
in that case, that's a kind of cohort reparations philosophy.
But it's not to say that every individual commits crime
we let off now that that's just crazy talk.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there's it's the gray,
it's the nuance, and I think these kinds of conversations
help us spend more time in there and help us
with our comfort level in the nuance, in the gray,
in the uncertainty, because.
Speaker 2: Learning too that we just can't predict very well, you know,
the fundamental level right that at the end of the day.
And that's another thing I show is that when you
use the data from the older cohorts and you predict
the younger cohorts outcomes, we do a poor job, And
to me, that's just a clean finding that again goes
to the point that we have to take these things
into account because we're just making large errors.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh gosh, there's so I hate that I have
a doctor's appointment, I have to get to you right now,
and you have a life that you have to leave too.
Speaker 2: But it's fun to talk about. I think I want
your job right you read books and talk to people about.
Speaker 1: It so great, And I mean, I really really hope
that the folks listening today, you know, pick up this
this book and dig into this even if it is
a you know, even if Chicago feels far from your consciousness,
it's a slice of something that expands your ability to
then shift your frame and shift your paradigm. Like I
do think that this kind of work can be paradigm
shifting work because it can change the way that people
engage and think about their place in society and think
about how they became who they are, why the people
around them are the way they are. I mean, this
right here is an empathy machine. I really think it's
important for our development as responsible citizens to expand our
thinking in this way. And the work that you've done
really these are the tools that we need to improve empathy.
And so I'm a grateful for that, and I'm grateful
for you spending the time with us to talk about
the book. Tell me, is there like a name to
the ongoing study if people want to read more about
it beyond the book, what would they kind of search for?
Speaker 2: Well, the study is called the Project on Human Development
in Chicago Neighborhoods. That's what started in the mid nineties
and it's still ongoing. We're planning to do more work,
crazy as it sounds, and so there's a website for
the project that can be found on my website. It's
devoted solely not just to my work, but to all
the work that the project has been involved with over
the years. So if people search on Project on Human
Development in Chicago Neighborhoods on the Harvard website, they should
be able to find it. And we hope to keep
going because there's a lot of change surely to come
that we want to capture.
Speaker 1: And obviously your previous book was the Sorry not the
but Great American City, Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect,
and this book is called Marked by Time. How societal
change has Transformed Crime and the life Trajectories of Young
Americans by doctor Robert J. Sampson. Robert, rob thank you
so much for being here.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you for speaking with me. It's been a pleasure.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and everybody listening, thank you for coming back week
after week. I'm really looking forward to the next time
we all get together to talk. Mardy