People born in different years, even not that far apart, have wildly different outcomes.

Over the past three decades, successive birth cohorts in the United States have come of age in very different worlds of crime and its control. These shifting contexts shape people’s life chances in ways that challenge the belief in stable, individual propensities to commit crime and in timeless rules for predicting risk. Focusing on the life course of different birth cohorts — on when we are rather than who we are — reveals the power of the birth lottery of history.

This matters because common risk-assessment practices pervade the criminal justice system and extend well beyond it. Formal risk instruments are used to inform pretrial release and probation decisions, while criminal history information is used in sentencing, employment screening, tenant screening and occupational licensing. With the emergence of AI tools and large-scale databases, predictive risk assessment is accelerating.

But prognostications like these rest on assumptions of an individual’s stable criminal propensity or character. New research exposes the perils of this approach, revealing how rapidly changing times challenge common notions about prediction and enduring propensities to commit crime.

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