Sociological research shows the era a person is born into—the "birth lottery of history"—is a more significant predictor of criminality than individual factors like psychology or poverty. Just a few years' difference can double the arrest rate for people from otherwise identical backgrounds.
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Data suggests that growing up without a biological father is a stronger predictor of a young man ending up in jail by age 30 than either his race or his family's income level. This highlights a profound social crisis rooted in family structure, distinct from purely economic or racial factors.
Risk assessment tools used in courts are often trained on old data and fail to account for societal shifts in crime and policing, creating "cohort bias." This leads to massive overpredictions of an individual's likelihood to commit a crime, resulting in harsher, unjust sentences.
Research shows social determinants of health, dictated by your location, have a greater impact on your well-being and lifespan than your DNA. These factors include access to quality food, medical care, and environmental safety, highlighting deep systemic inequalities in healthcare outcomes.
The phrase "I make my own luck" is a misnomer. Life outcomes are a function of two things: luck (uncontrollable) and decision quality. While you can't control luck, you can consistently make better decisions that increase the probability of favorable outcomes over time.
Most crimes are committed by people under 35, and recidivism rates for those over 50 are near zero. Despite this, the fastest-growing demographic in U.S. prisons is people over 55. This highlights a costly misalignment between sentencing policies and the reality of criminal behavior over a lifespan.
Counterintuitively, the heritability of traits like cognition and personality increases from childhood into adulthood. This occurs because individuals increasingly select and shape their own environments based on their genetic predispositions, a process that amplifies the influence of their genes over time.
The onset of antisocial behavior before age 10 is one of the biggest predictors of a lifelong pattern of offending. Cold, callous aggression towards others or animals at this young age, often with a heavy genetic component, has a poor prognosis and currently has vanishingly few effective treatments.
The idea of a stable "criminal character" is a trap. Societal conditions can completely override individual traits like self-control. A person with high self-control in a high-crime era was just as likely to be arrested as a person with low self-control in a later, lower-crime era.
Trying to determine which traits you inherited from your parents is clouded by the 'noise' of shared environment and complex psychological relationships. For a more accurate assessment, skip a generation and analyze your four grandparents. The generational remove provides a cleaner, less biased signal of your genetic predispositions.
In restrictive environments where choices are limited, genetics play a smaller role in life outcomes. As society provides more opportunity and information—for example, in education for women or food availability—individual genetic predispositions become more significant differentiators, leading to genetically-driven inequality.