Research Activities: Shawn Bushway
Dr. Bushway is a criminologist at the School of Criminal Justice who has just come to Albany from the University of Maryland, where he remains an affiliate of the Maryland Population Research Center. His research focuses on three areas: 1) the relationship between work and crime at the aggregate and individual level; 2) the changes in criminal offending over the life course, and 3) racial/ethnic disparity in the criminal justice system.
In the area of work and crime, Bushway examines the link between unemployment rates and crime and has written the definitive review of crime prevention programs with a labor-market focus. He also examines the role of work in the reentry process from prison. This research focuses on the idea that employment leads to decreases in crime. In the course of it, he has addressed the linkage of adolescent work with increased crime that is the subject of a substantial body of work in psychology and sociology. In a 2006 paper in Crime and Delinquency (2006), he and his co-authors distinguish between formal and informal employment, finding that the latter is indeed connected with problem behavior but the former is not directly linked. In the area of crime over the life course, Bushway has focused on methods and measurement, with the goal in part of better defining and measuring desistance from crime. In a 2005 paper in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, he implicates a dynamic state dependent process in the development of crime and desistance from it over time. In the area of the criminal justice system, Bushway’s research is motivated by the magnitude and apparent ubiquity of racial disparity in the criminal-justice system: blacks are eight times more likely to be in prison than whites. While this disparity has large implications for inequality in society, it may not necessarily imply that the system itself is discriminatory. Bushway has focused his modeling skills on attempts to identify the role of race in different decisions in the criminal-justice process, for example, the way in which discretion is allocated across the actors in the system. In a forthcoming article in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, he shows how formal guideline systems that attempt to reduce disparity can displace discretion from judges to prosecutors.
Externally funded work
Bushway is currently a PI on an NICHD R03 to study the role of intense work involvement in adolescent delinquency (“Causality between Youth Employment and Problem Behavior”). He is also a PI on an NSF project to extend this research to consider the impact of work quality and area unemployment on adolescent behavior (“The Impact of Employment, Job Quality, and Labor Market Context on Adolescent Problem Behavior”). He has, in addition, an NIJ contract to review and extend the literature on the crime-control benefits of incarceration (“Incapacitation”). While at Maryland, he completed an NIMH subcontract with the RYDS project at Albany with the purpose of better understanding desistance.
Work in progress and
pending/planned research projects
Dr. Bushway expects to continue his empirical and theoretical research on the process of desistance from crime for young adults. He is in the process of developing new growth curve models. In other work, he is exploring the rule of identity in criminal behavior. He is also attempting to better integrate economic tools into the study of crime. One current working paper uses the rational-choice model of behavior to extend the principles of outcome analysis, commonly used to study racial profiling by police, to the bail-setting behavior of judges.
Contributions to the
population research program
Since Bushway has just arrived, it is premature to determine his future contribution to the program, but, at a minimum, he will help to bring economic reasoning into core areas of the Center’s research and to link better the population-related research at the School of Criminal Justice with that done by associates whose academic homes are the social-science departments.
Use of infrastructure cores and activities
It is anticipated that CSDA will provide some seed money to help Bushway get his research program underway at Albany. The Center will also be able to help him acquire data sets, especially confidential ones (e.g., Add Health).