Desistance
Desistance
A 30 Year Fascination with Desistance
I was lucky enough to become Dr. Daniel Nagin’s advisee in 1993 after returning to Carnegie Mellon from a year of teaching Economics at the University of Latvia. That same year, Dan published a paper with Ken Land on a method to estimate trajectories of offending using data on the same people over many years. My fate was sealed—I am still fascinated with describing and explaining trajectories of desistance 32 years later.
I sometimes wish I had a good story, like that my great-grandfather was a hardened criminal in his twenties who then became a model citizen through the love of a good woman. No such luck.
The Math Behind the Change
The far more pedantic explanation is that John Laub and Rob Sampson were becoming famous for talking about desistance around that time, and I was interested in the math behind the criminal career models of desistance. (Shout out to Barnett, Blumstein, and Farrington 1989, one of the more elegant papers ever published in Criminology).
My interest only grew during my postdoctoral fellowship with Raymond Paternoster, which culminated in our oft-cited 2009 piece on the Desistance and the Feared Self: Toward an Identity Theory of Desistance. It’s a great paper with a split personality. Ray’s section focuses on how identity change is a normal part of human development. Mine focuses on the math behind different conceptual models of desistance.
Yes, Ray’s part is far more interesting. But the key in both is the recognition—then revolutionary and now almost commonplace—that the individual's choice to change is the first mover in the process of desistance.
Flipping the Script: From Stability to Change
My most quantitatively rigorous work on desistance, also published in 2009, concluded that the standard criminological trajectory models discard virtually all the individual-level change that takes place over the lifetime, in part because it was chaotic (Bushway, Sweeten, and Nieuwbeerta 2009). The resulting smoothed models of nice trajectories, which are based on the group average, create the false impression of stability with smooth glidepaths of change as people age. Real human change is not like that.
Not long after, my friend and fellow member of the "Paternoster Mafia," Bobby Brame, published two papers showing that 30% of Americans were arrested at least once by the time they were 22. Shortly thereafter, my world was rocked by a criminally under-cited paper by Rhodes et al. showing how the standard estimates of recidivism dramatically overstate the rate at which people recidivate—most people who go to prison do not return to prison. These descriptive papers definitively flipped the script: the story of offending was not one of stability but rather one of near-constant change.
My ill-fated attempts to sound interesting at cocktail parties are almost always met by one of two comments: “I hated statistics in college,” and “Wow, I would find it boring to study the same thing for thirty years.” I could not be more excited.
Thirty years in, my use of math as an entry point to the question of desistance has lessened, but now I am driven by the challenge of imagining public policies that build on and celebrate the fact that most people who get involved in the criminal justice system can and do change. That drive has been amplified by the opportunities I have had, both professionally and personally, to interact with people involved with the criminal justice system.
Selected Papers on Desistance
Paternoster, Raymond and Shawn Bushway (2009). "Desistance and the "Feared Self": Toward an Identity Theory of Criminal Desistance," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 99:4:1109-1156.
Bushway, Shawn, Gary Sweeten* and Paul Nieuwbeerta (2009). "Measuring Long Term Individual Trajectories of Offending Using Multiple Methods," Journal of Quantitative Criminology 25:3: 259-286.
Kurlychek, Megan; Shawn Bushway, and Robert Brame (2012). “Long-term Crime Desistance and Recidivism Patterns – Evidence from the Essex County Convicted Felon Study.” Criminology 50:1:71-104.
Brame, Robert; Michael Turner, Raymond Paternoster and Shawn Bushway. (2012). "Cumulative Prevalence of Arrest from Ages 8-23 in a National Sample." Pediatrics 129:1:21-27.
Brame, Robert; Shawn Bushway, Raymond Paternoster and Michael Turner (2014) "Demographic Patterns of Cumulative Arrest Prevalence by Ages 18 and 23." Crime and Delinquency 60:3:471-486.
Tahamont, Sarah*; Shi Yan*, Shawn Bushway and Jing Liu (2015). “Pathways to Prison in New York State.” Criminology and Public Policy 14:3.1-23.
Kim, Jaeok* and Shawn Bushway (2018). “Using Longitudinal Self-Report Data to Study the Age-Crime Relationship.” Journal of Quantitative Criminology. 34:2:367-396.
Bushway, Shawn (2021). Reentry, Desistance, and Identity Achievement. Washington DC:American Enterprise Institute.
Hickert, Audrey, Bushway, Shawn, Nieuwbeerta, Paul, Dirkzwager, Anja J.E. (2021) “Confinement as a Two‐stage Turning Point: Do Changes in Identity or Social Structure Predict Subsequent Changes in Criminal Activity?” Criminology 59: 73-108.