University Information

Research Interests:

One broad substantive area of interest is desistance from crime. Shawn has focused on measuring desistance and developing methods to study the causal factors driving desistance using panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the Rochester Youth Development Study. He has also conducted research on the process of reentry, and the role of work (and work restrictions) on offender reentry. This research involves study of the stigmatic impact of a criminal history record and of the efficacy of crime prevention programs based in the labor market. Recent work has attempted to assess how long an ex-offender has to remain arrest-free before he “looks like” a non-offender.

A second substantive interest involves the sentencing process. The criminal justice system has multiple actors who interact to create a sentencing outcome. Modeling the location and allocation of discretion within that system is an interesting and important research endeavor. Recently, Shawn has begun to study the impact of incarceration on offending over the life course, a topic that combines his two interests.

Professional Biography:

Shawn Bushway is a criminologist with a background in public policy, economics and statistics. In all of his research, he attempts to a) think about policy relevance and b) empirically identify causal relationships, usually with quasi-experimental techniques.