This article draws on official criminal histories for multiple birth cohorts spanning a 17-y difference in birth year to study how social change can alter our understanding of influential theories and policies about criminal offender groups. Arrest histories are linked to comprehensive longitudinal measurement on over 1,000 individuals originally from Chicago. Using group-based trajectory modeling, we investigated the magnitude and type of cohort differences in trajectories of arrest over the period 1995 to 2020. Our results show that trajectory group membership varies strongly by birth cohort. Membership in the nonoffender group is nearly 15 percentage points higher for cohorts born in the mid-1990s as compared to those born in the 1980s; conversely, older cohorts are more likely to be members of adolescent-limited and chronic-offender groups. Large cohort differences in trajectory group membership persist after controlling for a wide-ranging set of demographic characteristics and early-life risk factors that vary by cohort and that prior research has identified as important influences on crime. Not only does the effect of social change on cohort differentiation persist, but its magnitude is comparable to—indeed larger than—differences in trajectory group membership associated with varying levels of self-control or by whether individuals grew up in high-poverty households. These results suggest that changes in the broader social environment shared by members of the same birth cohort are as powerful in shaping their trajectory group membership as classic predictors identified in prior research, a finding that carries implications for crime-control policies that rely on prediction.

本文借鉴了出生年份相差 17 岁的多胞胎的官方犯罪历史，以研究社会变革如何改变我们对有关犯罪集团的有影响力的理论和政策的理解。逮捕历史与对来自芝加哥的 1,000 多人的综合纵向测量相关联。使用基于组的轨迹建模，我们调查了 1995 年至 2020 年期间逮捕轨迹队列差异的大小和类型。我们的结果表明轨迹组成员资格因出生队列而异。与 1980 年代出生的人相比，1990 年代中期出生的人在非犯罪者组中的成员人数高出近 15 个百分点；相反，年龄较大的群体更有可能是青少年和慢性罪犯群体的成员。在控制了一系列广泛的人口特征和早期生活风险因素后，轨迹组成员的巨大队列差异仍然存在，这些因素因队列而异，并且先前的研究已确定对犯罪有重要影响。社会变迁对队列分化的影响不仅持续存在，而且其幅度与与不同自我控制水平或个人是否在高贫困家庭长大有关的轨迹组成员身份差异相当——实际上更大。这些结果表明，与先前研究中确定的经典预测因素一样，同一出生队列成员共享的更广泛社会环境的变化在塑造他们的轨迹组成员资格方面同样强大，这一发现对依赖预测的犯罪控制政策具有影响。