Robert J. Sampson

"One out of every ten prisoners in the United States is serving a life sentence--roughly 130,000 people. While some have been sentenced to life in prison without parole, the majority of prisoners serving 'life' will be released back into society. But what becomes of those people who reenter the everyday world after serving life in prison? In After Life Imprisonment, Marieke Liem carefully examines the experiences of 'lifers' upon release. Through interviews with over sixty homicide offenders sentenced to life but granted parole, Liem tracks those able to build a new life on the outside and those who were re-incarcerated. The interviews reveal prisoners' reflections on being sentenced to life, as well as the challenges of employment, housing, and interpersonal relationships upon release. Liem explores the increase in handing out of life sentences, and specifically provides a basis for discussions of the goals, costs, and effects of long-term imprisonment, ultimately unpacking public policy and discourse surrounding long-term incarceration. A profound criminological examination, After Life Imprisonment reveals the untold, lived experiences of prisoners before and after their life sentences"--Provided by publisher.

"This book analyzes newly collected data on crime and social development up to age 70 for 500 men who were remanded to reform school in the 1940s. Born in Boston in the late 1920s and early 1930s, these men were the subjects of the classic study Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck (1950). Updating the men's lives at the close of the twentieth century, and connecting their adult experiences to childhood, this book is arguably the longest longitudinal study to date of age, crime, and the life course." "John Laub and Robert Sampson's long-term data, combined with in-depth interviews, defy the conventional wisdom that links individual traits such as poor verbal skills, limited self-control, and difficult temperament to long-term trajectories of offending. The authors reject the idea of categorizing offenders to reveal etiologies of offending - rather, they connect variability in behavior to social context. They find that men who desisted from crime were rooted in structural routines and had strong social ties to family and community."--Jacket.

Sampson and Laub revisit Sheldon and Eleanor Gluecks' mid-century study of 500 delinquents and 500 nondelinquents from childhood to adulthood. They reanalyze the raw data and develop a theory of informal social control which acknowledges the importance of childhood behavior but rejects the implication that adult social factors have little relevance.