OSI–Baltimore hosted a presentation by Dr. John H. Laub, who discussed data on crime and social development for 500 men who were originally remanded to reform school in the 1940s. Representing what is arguably the longest longitudinal study of age, crime, and development in the world, the goal of the data is to understand the lives of troubled boys as they progress from childhood and adolescence to adulthood and old age. Dr. Laub discussed the reasons why these youth continued or abandoned their criminal activity over time.
Dr. Laub is a professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, College Park, as well as an Affiliated Scholar at the Henry A. Murray Center at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. He is the past President of the American Society of Criminology. His areas of research include crime and deviance over the life course, juvenile delinquency and juvenile justice, and the history of criminology. He has published widely including Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points Through Life, with Robert Sampson, Harvard University Press (1993) and most recently, Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives: Delinquent Boys to Age 70, also with Robert Sampson, Harvard University Press (2003).