Robert J. Sampson

Robert J. Sampson (born July 9, 1956, and Director of the Social Sciences Program at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. From 2005 through 2010, Sampson served as the Chair of the Department of Sociology at Harvard. In 2011–2012, he was elected as the President of the American Society of Criminology.

Education Sampson received his Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology from the University at Buffalo, SUNY in 1977. He then went on to receive a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Criminal Justice from University at Albany, SUNY in 1983. For the 1997–1998 and 2002–2003 academic years he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California.

In 2003, Sampson joined Harvard University where he became the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences. He also became the Founding Director of the Boston Area Research Initiative.

Sampson was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2006. He was a founding co-editor of the journal the Annual Review of Criminology.

Research Sampson has published widely in the areas of crime, neighborhood effects, ecometrics, and the social organization of cities. In the area of neighborhood effects and urban studies his work has focused on race/ethnicity and social mechanisms of ecological inequality, immigration and crime, the meanings and implications of "disorder," spatial disadvantage, collective civic engagement, and other topics linked to the general idea of community-level social processes. Much of this work stems from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN).

Sampson published his first book in 1993, co-authored with John Laub, entitled Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points Through Life. It received the Michael J. Hindelang Outstanding Book Award from the American Society of Criminology in 1994. The book detailed a longitudinal study from birth to death of 1,000 disadvantaged men born in Boston during the Great Depression era. Sampson built upon the research of Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, whose records had been stored in the Harvard Law School basement. The Gluecks had interviewed young men in the 1930s: Sampson revisited the same men, now in their 60s and 70s, to gather further data about their lives. The project is the longest life-course study of criminal behavior ever conducted. It showed, among other things, that even highly active criminals can change and stop committing crimes after key turning points in life such as marriage, military service, or employment that cut connections to offending peer groups. Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives received the outstanding book award from the American Society of Criminology in 2004. That same year, Sampson was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

In 2012, Sampson published Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect, which details his decade's worth of research on the city of Chicago.

Works Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points through Life, with John Laub, 1995, Attitudes toward Crime, Police, and the Law: Individual and neighborhood differences: Summary of research, with Dawn Jeglum Bartusch, 1999, Disorder in urban neighborhoods: Does it lead to crime, with Stephen W. Raudenbush, 2001, Developmental Criminology and Its Discontents: Trajectories of Crime from Childhood to Old Age, co-edited with John Laub, 2005, Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives: Delinquent Boys to Age 70, with John Laub, 2006, The Explanation of Crime: Context, Mechanisms and Development, with Per-Olof Wikström, 2009, The Moynihan Report Revisited: Lessons and Reflections After Four Decades, co-edited with Douglas Massey, 2009, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect, 2012, After Life Imprisonment: Reentry in the Era of Mass Incarceration, with Marieke Liem, 2016, Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans, 2026,