Shawn D. Bushway, Board of Directors
Shawn D. Bushway is a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. He is on leave from the University at Albany (SUNY), where he received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship. 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. His work has been cited over 15,000 times and a network analysis of co-authors place him at the center of the field. He has done research on the causal relationship between work and crime, the use of discretion by actors in the criminal justice system, and the process of desistance. Occasionally, the areas intersect, such as his collection of studies on the appropriate role of criminal history records in employment decisions. On the basis of his research, Bushway has provided testimony to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Maryland Public Service Commission, and served as founding member of the New York State Permanent Commission on Sentencing Reform. He 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 has a Ph.D. in public policy and economics from the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, which recently recognized him as a Distinguished Alumnus.