Shawn D. Bushway

Is Believing Our Kids Are Safer Worth Closing Off Some of Their Futures?

Placing an officer in a school appears to reduce violence and petty crimes within a school. But it also creates long-term negative consequences for students who are increasingly likely to become involved in the school disciplinary system.

Letters and Cards Telling People About Local Police Reduce Crime

Researchers conducted a large field experiment to deliver cards and letters to residents of a community with information about local police officers. They then evaluated how knowing some information about individuals one has never met can manifest in judgments about them and potentially reduce crime.

Why Unemployed Men with Criminal Records Could Be Key to Solving the U.S. Labor Shortage

American employers are panicked about the lack of willing workers. They shouldn't be. There are plenty of Americans who want to work. If you're an employer, you may be wondering where all these potential employees are hiding. They aren't hiding—they've been applying to your job openings, and you've been screening them out.

Defund Prisons, Not Police

The United States spends billions on prisons, jails, and juvenile detention facilities. New lows in incarceration rates present a chance to shift resources away from costly correctional facilities and toward education, job training, transportation, and other community services.

Research Brief

Modest Financial Incentives for Businesses Can Increase Employment of People with Criminal Records

This brief summarizes research into financial incentives that increase employers’ willingness to hire applicants with criminal records. The researchers find that tax credits and insurance increase employers’ willingness to hire such individuals.

Journal Article

The Thin Blue Line in Schools: New Evidence on School-Based Policing Across the U.S.

We find that school resource officers reduce some forms of violence, but do not prevent gun-related incidents. We also find that SROs intensify the use of suspension, expulsion, police referral, and arrest of students.

Draft

Direct Incentives May Increase Employment of People With Criminal Records

Explores whether direct incentives for employers may increase employment of people with criminal records.

Journal Article

Federal Criminal Sentencing: Race-Based Disparate Impact and Differential Treatment in Judicial Districts

Race-based inequity in federal criminal sentencing is widely acknowledged, and yet our understanding of it is far from complete.

Research Brief

The Impact of Defense Counsel at Bail Hearings

Roughly half of U.S. counties do not provide defense counsel at bail hearings. A field experiment in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows that providing counsel can decrease the use of monetary bail and pretrial detention.

Journal Article

The Impact of Defense Counsel at Bail Hearings

Roughly half of U.S. counties do not provide defense counsel at bail hearings, and few studies have documented the potential impacts of legal representation at this stage.

Journal Article

Racial Disparities in Criminal Sentencing Vary Considerably Across Federal Judges

Substantial race-based disparities exist in federal criminal sentencing. We analyze 380,000 recent (2006–2019) sentences in the JUSTFAIR database and show that these disparities are large and vary considerably across judges.

Journal Article

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Workers with a Criminal History

In this article, we use data from the NLSY97 COVID-19 Supplement to examine the extent to which workers with a criminal history record had employment disruptions during the early months of the pandemic.

Journal Article

The Long-Term Incarceration Consequences of Coming-of-Age in a Crime Boom

We examine the relationship between incarceration rates individuals experience in their thirties and the crime conditions they experienced throughout their youth.

Report

Criminal History Record Information Sharing with the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency: Education and Training Materials for State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial Partners

This report presents materials to facilitate more effective and efficient criminal history record information sharing with the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, which performs federal background investigations.

Journal Article

Barred from Employment: More Than Half of Unemployed Men in Their 30s Had a Criminal History of Arrest

We investigate what portion of the pool of unemployed men in the United States have been arrested, convicted, or incarcerated by age 35.

Research Brief

Resetting Recidivism Risk Prediction

A RAND research report proposes the novel reset principle to guide more-accurate recidivism risk prediction for criminal background checks. The research also demonstrates the viability of a risk-prediction model that satisfies the reset principle.

Commentary

How Different Sampling Methods Paint Vastly Different Pictures of Recidivism, and Why It Matters for Policy

In this paper, the authors argue that the recidivism statistics cited most often in debates about the collateral consequences of conviction overrepresent the behaviors of frequent recidivists and so are not appropriate evidence in those debates.

Report

Providing Another Chance: Resetting Recidivism Risk in Criminal Background Checks

The authors propose the reset principle that anchors assessments of recidivism risk at the time of a background check rather than the time of conviction, as current methods derived from the criminal justice context do.

Journal Article

Failing to Follow the Rules: Can Imprisonment Lead to More Imprisonment Without More Actual Crime?

We find that people involved in low-level crime receiving a prison sentence are more likely than those with non-prison sentences to be re-imprisoned due to technical violations of parole, rather than due to new crimes.

Journal Article

Prior Punishments and Cumulative Disadvantage: How Supervision Status Impacts Prison Sentences

This article explores one way prior punishments may contribute to cumulative disadvantage: through more severe sentencing of those under criminal justice supervision.

Journal Article

A Truth Serum for Your Personal Perspective on Facial Recognition Software in Law Enforcement

The authors suggest that it is important to separate the use of facial recognition for forensics and mass surveillance.

Journal Article

A Better Path Forward for Criminal Justice: A Report by the Brookings-AEI Working Group on Criminal Justice Reform

In this volume, experts offer policymakers with analysis and recommendations to support sustained, bipartisan reforms to move the criminal justice system toward a more humane and effective footing.

Journal Article

Reentry, Desistance, and Identity Achievement

This report is based on two foundational beliefs: Reentry policy needs to be based on a theoretical desistance model, and the empirical evidence supports a desistance model that involves movement toward a positive pro-social identity.

Research Brief

The Prevalence of Criminal Records Among Small Business Owners

This research brief addresses a new estimate of how many U.S. small businesses have owners with criminal history records.

Report

Small Businesses, Criminal Histories, and the Paycheck Protection Program

In this report, researchers estimate how many small businesses have owners with criminal history records and how many businesses were potentially affected by Paycheck Protection Program restrictions on applicants with felony records.

Journal Article

A Policy Review of Employers' Open Access to Conviction Records

In this review, we find that (a) US employers' use of conviction information is not clearly aligned with the risk of future criminal behavior or employer costs, and (b) using such information leads to hiring errors that pose costs to society.

Journal Article

Sentencing Scorecards: Reducing Racial Disparities in Prison Sentences at Their Source

Scorecards are a common tool for public policy decisionmaking, but none highlight racial disparities in incarceration. We constructed county-level scorecards for racial disparities in incarceration rates for the NY State Permanent Commission on Sentencing.

Journal Article

Locking Up My Generation: Cohort Differences in Prison Spells Over the Life Course

Our study highlights that the crime-punishment wave in the 1980s and 1990s created cohort differences in incarceration over the life course that changed the level of incarceration even decades after the wave.

Journal Article

"Nothing Is More Opaque Than Absolute Transparency": The Use of Prior History to Guide Sentencing

This article reviews prior literature, evaluating an algorithm used to determine prison sentencing for criminals with prior history.

Journal Article

Confinement as a Two-Stage Turning Point: Do Changes in Identity or Social Structure Predict Subsequent Changes in Criminal Activity?

We build from prior work on desistance and reentry, contrasting our findings and highlighting the unique insight gained from, as well as challenges of, measuring individual change within our two-stage turning point model.

Journal Article

Making Schools Safer And/Or Escalating Disciplinary Response: A Study of Police Officers in North Carolina Schools

In this study, we try to understand the causal role that school resource officers play in school safety and the day-to-day practice of school discipline by using incident-level administrative data from North Carolina public schools.

Report

An Ounce of Prevention, a Pound of Uncertainty: The Cost-Effectiveness of School-Based Drug Prevention Programs

Focuses on school-based drug prevention programs that have proven effective in formal evaluations.

Research Brief

The Benefits and Costs of Drug Use Prevention: Clarifying a Cloudy Issue

The United States has for some time now been spending tens of billions of dollars a year in an attempt to control the trafficking and use of illicit drugs; most of those dollars have been used to support stricter enforcement.