Shawn Bushway

Specialization: Criminal Justice

Shawn D. Bushway has a PhD in economics and public policy from the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, which recognized him as a Distinguished Alumnus. He has spent most of his career in the field of criminology, where he has been recognized as a Distinguished Scholar for the Division of Corrections and Sentencing, and a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology. He is also a member of the National Academy of Science's Committee on Law and Justice. He has published two books and over 90 peer-reviewed articles in journals like Pediatrics, Nature, Science Advances, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Journal of Sociology and Criminology. His work has been cited over 16,000 times and he has been the PI on over $5 million of grants. He is a leading scholar in several areas, including the causal relationship between work and crime, the use of discretion by actors in the criminal justice system, and the process by which people desist from crime. Occasionally, the areas intersect, such as his collection of studies on the appropriate role of criminal history records, particularly old criminal history records, in employment decisions. On the basis of his research, Shawn has provided testimony to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Maryland Public Service Commission. He served as founding member of the New York State Permanent Commission on Sentencing Reform for nine years. He has also organized three NSF-funded workshops on sentencing and plea bargaining and was one of the founders of what has become the NBER summer workshop on Economics of Crime, the largest annual conference in the growing subfield of Economics and Crime. He is currently the Chief Narconomist for five High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas. The goal of Narconomics is to conduct research on drug trafficking organizations as businesses, and to use that insight to develop new strategies to disrupt drug supply and suppliers.