"Delinquency in a Birth Cohort is a turning point in criminological research in the United States," writes Norval Morris in his foreword. "What has been completely lacking until this book is an analysis of delinquency in a substantial cohort of youths, the cohort being defined other than by their contact with any part of the criminal justice system."
This study of a birth cohort was not originally meant to be etiological or predictive. Yet the data bearing on this cohort of nearly ten thousand boys born in 1945 and living in Philadelphia gave rise to a model for prediction of...

This volume describes the findings of a longitudinal, birth cohort study of juvenile delinquency in Puerto Rico. Carried out under the auspices of the Puerto Rican Senate's Special Crime Commission, the book represents a new type of birth cohort study, based on the classic work done in Philadelphia. The authors have traced Puerto Rican children born in 1970, both male and female, through the greater San Juan police departments, charting the incidence of delinquency and the number of recurring offenders. These findings are compared to the Philadelphia studies of 1945 and 1958. The book begins...

Delinquency in a Birth Cohort, published in 1972, was the first criminologi cal birth cohort study in the United States. Nils Christie, in Unge norske lovorertredere, had done the first such study as his dissertation at the University of Oslo in 1960. Professor Thorsten Sellin was the inspiration for the U.S. study. He could read Norwegian, and I could a little because I studied at the University of Oslo in my graduate years. Our interest in pursuing a birth cohort study in the United States was fostered by the encouragement of Saleem Shah who awarded us a grant from the National Institute of...