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.

Human Development and Criminal Behavior proposes an exten- sive agenda for crime research. The book is part of a pio- neering effort to understand the causes of crime, particu- larly its developmental course. It defines and sets the con- ditions necessary to conduct an accelerated longitudinal study of individuals at risk to become engaged in criminal careers. This work offers a blueprint for research to eluci- date and possibly prevent crime in our society.

Integration of disciplines, theories and research orientations has assumed a central role in criminological discourse yet it remains difficult to identify any concrete discoveries or significant breakthroughs for which integration has been responsible. Concentrating on three key concepts: context, mechanisms, and development, this volume aims to advance integrated scientific knowledge on crime causation by bringing together different scholarly approaches. Through an analysis of the roles of behavioural contexts and individual differences in crime causation, The Explanation of Crime seeks to provide a unified and focused approach to the integration of knowledge. Chapter topics range from individual genetics to family environments and from ecological behaviour settings to the macro-level context of communities and social systems. This is a comprehensive treatment of the problem of crime causation which will appeal to graduate students and researchers in criminology and be of great interest to policy-makers and practitioners in crime policy and prevention.

More than four decades after the publication of the controversial Moynihan Report, social scientists and policy analysts re-examine what the editors call "the most famous piece of social scientific analysis never published." As assistant secretary in the United States Department of Labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his report "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action" in 1965 as an internal document within the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson. It described alarming trends in black employment, poverty, and education and argued that they were exacerbated by black family instability. While Moynihan called for a jobs program to employ black men and stabilize families, the report was attacked as an attempt to blame blacks rather than the injustices in American society and widely vilified as sexist and racist in liberal circles. Now more than 40 years later, this issue of The ANNALS reviews this controversial yet "prophetic report" through a new lens, bringing together some of the country's foremost social scientists to consider how its arguments and predictions have fared in subsequent years and how the controversy surrounding it influenced social science in the late 20th century. The volume also examines current issues, such as the state of the labor market for young black men in the face of continued discrimination, the link between nonmarital childbearing and poverty, the impacts of the radical transformation in the welfare system, the emergence of mass incarceration society and the persistence of racial residential segregation. As race remains a fundamental cleavage in American society, intellectuals must embrace the systematic study of the sorts of difficult, sensitive, and often explosive issues first addressed in the Moynihan Report. This volume of The ANNALS is a must-read for students, scholars and policymakers who are ready for a more open, honest and civil debate on America's very real social problems today.

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 their lives at the close of the twentieth century, and connecting their adult experiences to childhood, this book is arguably the longest longitudinal study of age, crime, and the life course to date.

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.

By uniting life-history narratives with rigorous data analysis, the authors shed new light on long-term trajectories of crime and current policies of crime control.

Integration of disciplines, theories and research orientations has assumed a central role in criminological discourse yet it remains difficult to identify any concrete discoveries or significant breakthroughs for which integration has been responsible. Concentrating on three key concepts: context, mechanisms, and development, this volume aims to advance integrated scientific knowledge on crime causation by bringing together different scholarly approaches. Through an analysis of the roles of behavioural contexts and individual differences in crime causation, The Explanation of Crime seeks to provide a unified and focused approach to the integration of knowledge. Chapter topics range from individual genetics to family environments and from ecological behaviour settings to the macro-level context of communities and social systems. This is a comprehensive treatment of the problem of crime causation that will appeal to graduate students and researchers in criminology and be of great interest to policy-makers and practitioners in crime policy and prevention.

This new theory of crime over the life course provides an important foundation for rethinking criminal justice policy. It is based on the reanalysis of a classic set of data: Sheldon and Eleanor Gluecks' mid-century study of 500 delinquents and 500 nondelinquents from childhood to adulthood. Several years ago, Robert Sampson and John Laub dusted off sixty cartons of the Gleucks' data that had been stored in the basement of the Harvard Law School and undertook a lengthy process of recoding, computerizing, and reanalyzing it. On the basis of their findings, they developed a theory of informal social control that acknowledges the importance of childhood behavior but rejects the implication that adult social factors have little relevance. This theory accounts for both stability and change in crime and deviance throughout the life course.

First published in 1925, The City is a trailblazing text in the fields of urban history, urban sociology, and urban studies. Its innovative combination of ethnographic observation and social science theory epitomized the Chicago School of Sociology. Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and their collaborators documented the interplay between individuals and larger social structures and institutions, seeking patterns within the city's riot of people, events, and influences. As sociologist Robert J. Sampson notes in his new foreword, though much has changed since The City was first published, we can still benefit from its charge to explain where and why social and racial groups live as they do.

Life-course criminology has generated new energy and provoked sharp debate over competing ideas about the fundamental relationship between age and crime. A major catalyst for this debate a 2003 American Society of Criminology (ASC) conference session entitled "Age, Crime, and Human Development: The Future of Life-Course Criminology," chaired by the editors of this issue provided a springboard for this special issue of The Annals.

With an eye to the future, this special issue provides critical debate on patterns of age and crime across the full life course from infancy to late adulthood. Criminal career topics such as onset, continuation, termination, and career length are also discussed, along with the viability of developmental and taxonomic theories of crime, the suitability of existing data archives to test theories, and the prospects for marrying longitudinal and experimental studies.

The distinguished papers that appear in this compelling collection include the full set of presentations from the inaugural Albany Symposium on Crime and Justice "Developmental Criminology and Its Discontents: Offender Typologies and Trajectories of Crime," which took place in April 2005 and built upon the questions raised at the ASC conference session. In addition to the revised original papers and commentaries from the Albany symposium, this journal also includes never-before-published responses to the commentaries by each of the papers' authors. An overview by Alfred Blumstein of the central issues raised at the symposium and a book-review essay by Hans-Jurgen Kerner rounds out the volume and collectively provides a comprehensive representation of the provocative discussion ignited by these intriguing session panels.

Centered on the fundamental discussions raised by the life-course paradigm in criminology, this historical issue of The Annals will potentially shape the theoretical and research agenda for years to come. It is an essential resource for scholars, researchers, and practitioners in the fields of criminology, sociology, psychology, criminal justice, aging, human development, and social policy.

With a diverse set of viewpoints, this well-rounded and in-depth look at age, crime, and human development is a valuable contribution to existing studies and will serve as a foundation for future research into this lively topic. "

For over fifty years numerous public intellectuals and social theorists have insisted that community is dead. Some would have us believe that we act solely as individuals choosing our own fates regardless of our surroundings, while other theories place us at the mercy of global forces beyond our control. These two perspectives dominate contemporary views of society, but by rejecting the importance of place they are both deeply flawed. Based on one of the most ambitious studies in the history of social science, "Great American City" argues that communities still matter because life is decisively shaped by where you live. To demonstrate the powerfully enduring impact of place, Robert J. Sampson presents here the fruits of over a decade's research in Chicago combined with his own unique personal observations about life in the city, from Cabrini Green to Trump Tower and Millennium Park to the Robert Taylor Homes. He discovers that neighborhoods influence a remarkably wide variety of social phenomena, including crime, health, civic engagement, home foreclosures, teen births, altruism, leadership networks, and immigration. Even national crises cannot halt the impact of place, Sampson finds, as he analyzes the consequences of the Great Recession and its aftermath, bringing his magisterial study up to the fall of 2010. Following in the influential tradition of the Chicago School of urban studies but updated for the twenty-first century, "Great American City" is at once a landmark research project, a commanding argument for a new theory of social life, and the story of an iconic city.

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.

More than four decades after the publication of the controversial Moynihan Report, social scientists and policy analysts re-examine what the editors call "the most famous piece of social scientific analysis never published." As assistant secretary in the United States Department of Labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his report "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action" in 1965 as an internal document within the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson. It described alarming trends in black employment, poverty, and education and argued that they were exacerbated by black family instability. While Moynihan called for a jobs program to employ black men and stabilize families, the report was attacked as an attempt to blame blacks rather than the injustices in American society and widely vilified as sexist and racist in liberal circles. Now more than 40 years later, this issue of The ANNALS reviews this controversial yet "prophetic report" through a new lens, bringing together some of the country's foremost social scientists to consider how its arguments and predictions have fared in subsequent years and how the controversy surrounding it influenced social science in the late 20th century. The volume also examines current issues, such as the state of the labor market for young black men in the face of continued discrimination, the link between nonmarital childbearing and poverty, the impacts of the radical transformation in the welfare system, the emergence of mass incarceration society and the persistence of racial residential segregation. As race remains a fundamental cleavage in American society, intellectuals must embrace the systematic study of the sorts of difficult, sensitive, and often explosive issues first addressed in the Moynihan Report. This volume of The ANNALS is a must-read for students, scholars and policymakers who are ready for a more open, honest and civil debate on America's very real social problems today.