Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives: Delinquent Boys to Age 70 (review)

Why do some adolescent offenders find their way to a crime-free adult life of stable employment and happy marriages, while others persist in criminal behavior long into adulthood? In Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives: Delinquent Boys to Age 70, Laub and Sampson blend diverse methods of data collection and analysis to study continuity and change in criminal behavior over the adult life course. Laub and Sampson develop a general theory of crime which emphasizes informal social control, routine social activities, and human agency. They aim to account both for persistent offending and for desistance from crime, and argue that their findings "are more general than specific with respect to place, historical time, gender, and race" (283).

The research effort undertaken for Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives is ambitious and impressive. Laub and Sampson follow up Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck's original sample of delinquent youth who were sent to two Massachusetts correctional schools during adolescence. They conduct death record and criminal history searches for all 500 original sample members. They also complete detailed life-history interviews with a subset of 52 of these men, now approaching age 70. This tracing effort is particularly remarkable given that over 35 years had elapsed since these individuals were last contacted by the Gluecks. Moreover, sample members all had a criminal past (and as Laub and Sampson note, sometimes also a "criminal present"), bringing into question their eagerness to be found in the first place.

Laub and Sampson begin their analysis with a detailed quantitative examination of age-crime trajectories. They note considerable stability in the determinants of crime across the life span, but also individual variability in the age-crime relationship which is not well explained by traditional indicators of childhood risk. Although the overall level of offending does tend to be greater in a high than low childhood risk group, the shape of the age-crime profile is largely indistinguishable between these two groups of adolescent offenders, suggesting similar causal pathways towards desistance. Persistent offending is not well predicted based on indicators of childhood or adolescent risk. Although it is important to keep in mind that Laub and Sampson's sample includes only serious adolescent offenders, their analysis offers a significant challenge to a developmental taxonomy approach to understanding patterns of offending. These results are certain to stimulate additional research, using population-based samples, on the causal determinants of desistance.

Laub and Sampson turn next to their richly detailed life-history narratives. Here they particularly demonstrate the importance of turning points associated with life events such as entering a high-quality marriage, reform school, or military service. Many results from the in-depth interviews are further confirmed in a final quantitative analysis in which within-individual variations in crime are considered simultaneously with between-individual differences in the propensity to offend. Reflecting on both their qualitative and quantitative results, Laub and Sampson offer a more nuanced perspective on how turning points function in the desistance process than in their previous book, Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points Through Life. They point to direct causal effects of situations and contexts, but also allow for selection effects and for personal agency. For example, Laub and Sampson argue that marriage can promote desistance by providing access to support and other resources (including direct monitoring of behavior) offered by a spouse, restructuring routine social activities, and promoting an increased sense of responsibility. But they also acknowledge that individuals vary in their responsiveness to the potential turning point offered by marriage, such that men who make an inner resolve to change are ". . . better positioned situationally to respond to the monitoring and control and the love and social support around them" (249). Like employment and military service, marriage can be a catalyst for change, but it is not deterministic.

Some readers may question the generalizability of these findings, given that Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives reflects the lives of white men who grew up in...