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Recent Scientific Accomplishments Bushway’s 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) the 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. However, there is a substantial body of work in psychology and sociology that links adolescent work with increased crime. In a 2003 Social Forces paper, Bushway examined the role of adolescent work using panel data methods, and found that the typically positive relationship between work and crime was reduced to zero. Another paper in Crime and Delinquency (2006) recognized that criminals work more during adolescence, but they also begin to move earlier from informal work to more formal paycheck or employer work. In the area of crime over the life course, Bushway focuses on methods and measurement. He wrote a Criminology (2001) paper which attempted to better define what it is meant by desistance from crime. Two follow-up papers in 2003 in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology and Criminology applied these ideas to the measurement of desistance, which appears to be a process of disengagement from criminal activity rather than a simple on/off switch. Also, a 2005 paper in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology implicated a dynamic state dependent process in the development of crime and desistance over time. In the area of the criminal justice system, Bushway studies how racial disparity in the criminal justice system is ubiquitous ?blacks are eight times more likely to be in prison than whites. While this has potentially 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 on 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, Bushway shows how formal guideline systems which attempt to reduce disparity can displace discretion from judges to prosecutors. Bushway’s research has begun to see some intersection between these areas of research. For example, a forthcoming article in Criminology and Public Policy uses techniques from life course criminology to shed light on the relevance of criminal history records for employment decisions. Bushway is currently the principal investigator (P.I.) on an NICHD R03 to study the role of intense work involvement in explaining adolescent delinquency (NICHD 2005-2007). He is also P.I. on an NSF project to extend this research to consider the role of work quality and area unemployment on adolescent behavior (NSF 2005-2007). He also works on an NIMH subcontract which is part of a larger project to collect data on young adults in an ongoing panel study, in an attempt to better understand desistance (NIMH 2002-2007). Finally, he also had an NIJ contract to review and extend the literature on the crime control benefits of incarceration (NIJ 2006). Bushway expects to study empirically and theoretically the process of desistance from crime for young adults. He is in the process of developing new growth curve models. In other work with MPRC criminologist Ray Paternoster, Bushway is exploring the rule of identity in criminal behavior. He is teaming up with economists as part of his effort to better integrate economic tools into the study of crime. One current working paper with MPRC economist Jonah Gelbach uses the rational choice model of behavior to extend the principle of outcome analysis, commonly used to study racial profiling by police, to examine the bail setting behavior of judges. | ||||||||
Maryland Population Research Center
0124N Cole Student Activities Building (#162)
College Park, MD 20742
Phone: 301-405-6403
Fax: 301-405-5743