On April 29th, 2007, the AAPSS inducted the Fellows of 2007. The following are excerpts from recipient Robert Sampson's remarks.

In the 1980s when John Laub and I were beginning our long-term study of human development over the life course, the dominant discourse in criminology was heavily weighted toward childhood “determinism.” Delinquents were somehow considered to either be born that way or damaged in childhood and were more or less destined to go on to a life of crime. The idea was that a lot of what happens in adulthood is traceable to immutable childhood characteristics. “Selective incapacitation” was also a dominant policy at the time, and in criminal justice the notion was that all we needed to do was to select those that we would predict to have lengthy criminal careers and lock them up, perhaps even before they committed a crime.

But our research has shown that there is tremendous heterogeneity throughout the life course and, in particular, that turning points matter. We have found that it especially matters how transitions are experienced, transitions with regard to incarceration, employment, marriage, cohabitation, and other adult life events. Those transitions are important and they predict crime—a notion that has important policy implications. When our thinking about crime is not as dominated by the notion of childhood determinism, we can develop new kinds of policies. One concrete example is the concern emerging on all sides of the spectrum, liberal to conservative, with what’s known as re-entry and the exit of adults from prison.

A related area where research may make a difference is related to incarceration itself. Over the last ten years, the crime rate has come down but at the same time there has been a huge run-up in the imprisonment rate, to the point where we incarcerate people at unprecedented levels. The good news, though, is that that seems to be changing. There’s a new recognition that the incarceration rate relative to the crime rate has gotten to the point where it’s beyond what is sustainable, both with regard to cost but also with regard to what happens to people coming out of prison—the recognition that that costs money, too. For the first time in several years, a vigorous debate is going on that is comparing estimates of what it costs to keep somebody in prison for a year versus what would be the net benefit if we invested the same amount in early childhood education or child well-being. That is not the kind of conversations we were having ten years ago. Up until the recent past, the conversation has been mainly that you just lock more people up across the spectrum. And I think that the social science research that shows some of the counterintuitive effects of incarceration is getting notice. For example, there’s been a lot of good research on the costs of incarceration relative to its effects. People may think “Well, if the crime rate is going down and incarceration is going up, that means that that’s the cause.” But a lot of good research has shown that, yes, it is related but probably only accounts for anywhere between 10 and 20 percent of the crime decline. As a result of this change in thinking about incarceration, I predict perhaps not a radical change but a reduction in the rate of increase and more emphasis on treatment of drug offenders as opposed to just incarceration, more emphasis on rehabilitation and finally, much more serious emphasis on what to do with offenders when they come out.

Robert J. Sampson is the Chairman of the Department of Sociology and Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, and the 2007 Ernest W. Burgess Fellow of the AAPSS.