The Birth Lottery of History: Arrest over the Life Course of Multiple Cohorts Coming of Age, 1995–2018

This article advances and tests hypotheses on arrest in the lives of 1,057 individuals from an original longitudinal study of multiple birth cohorts who came of age during a period of considerable social change in the last quarter-century. The authors show that large cohort differences in the course of arrest arise from changing macrohistorical environments rather than dispositional, demographic, socioeconomic, or neighborhood differences in childhood. Further, the impact of two leading explanations of crime—socioeconomic disadvantage and low self-control—depends on the historical timing of when children reach late adolescence and early adulthood. Cohort fortunes diverge mainly as a result of when both crime rates and police enforcement—especially for drug offenses—unexpectedly fell. The results quantify the power of social change and contribute a new understanding of inter- and intracohort inequalities in growing up during the era of mass incarceration and the great American crime decline.