Signaling
Signaling
The Economist in Criminology: Turning a Problem into a Solution
Most people think of me as a criminologist. But, my PhD is in Public Policy Analysis and Political Economy. Yep, I passed the comprehensive exams in economics at Carnegie Mellon University, and I am a bona fide economist.
At the time I graduated, there were virtually no papers on crime in economics and few economists who studied crime, although the few that did—hat tip to Steve Levitt, Steven Raphael, Peter Reuter, Brian Forst, and Phil Cook—were amazing scholars. Over time, as the study of crime by economists has become more common, economists have contributed both through the application of economic theory and the application of causal econometric methods (Bushway and Reuter 2008).
Is It Bias or is it Agency?
I was part of this trend, and I am proud of my papers that found ways to apply rigorous causal methods to the study of crime and the criminal justice system (Paternoster et al. 2003, Sweeten et al. 2009, Denver et al. 2017). But somewhere along the way, I noticed that selection bias wasn’t just the enemy of good causal analysis.
Selection bias in studies of programs comes about in part because people exercise their agency to self-select into programs. Those who finish programs are not the same as those who don’t. Maybe that is not just a sticky econometric issue—maybe it’s the act of agents trying to identify themselves as desisters.
It's hard to believe this now, but that idea—that we can learn something from selection bias—was in a chapter I wrote with Peter Reuter for the second edition of Crime by Wilson and Petersilia. It's hard to describe what it meant to have those two rock stars ask us to write that chapter. Remember, I was a 33-year-old assistant professor. The first time I met James Q. Wilson in LA at an ASC conference, he complimented my work with great specificity and proceeded to do what many other people wish they could — he rendered me absolutely speechless.
From an Idea to a Signal
We wrote a new version of that same article with more developed ideas for the third edition, and the idea came to fruition as the lead article on signaling in a special issue of Criminology and Public Policy in 2012. The issue had seven discussants, and we had a briefing on Capitol Hill . Signaling is an economic concept developed in the 1970s as a solution to a principal-agent problem where the principals didn’t have full information. Bob Apel and I suggested for the first time that program participation could be a signal for employers and others who are looking to identify low-risk people—i.e., desisters.
I had the opportunity to lay out the idea more clearly in 2021 with Nidhi Kalra in a piece on background checks, of all things.
This paper has had an interesting shelf life—it's among my more cited papers, but the idea is still disorientating to most people. Correctional programmers have been lectured about the evils of selection bias and "cream skimming" ad nauseam, and here comes an economist to suggest that people with records could be using program completion to signal their desistance. At the same time, risk prediction presents itself as a cheaper and faster alternative. But, remember, we cannot accurately predict who will desist.
The Idea Comes to Life
I had actually given up a bit on this idea when I was approached by Janos Toevs, who built an entire prison program on signaling while incarcerated. We are currently working on a paper together, and I am actively pursuing research on how signals about desistance can be sent and received while in prison. The idea has resonated with people on the ground in a way that can only be described as stunning, and the enthusiasm of the people in the field has reenergized my own efforts to further this idea.
Selected Papers on Signaling
Bushway, Shawn and Robert Apel. (2012). "A Signaling Perspective on Employment-based Reentry Programming: Training Completion as a Desistance Signal. Criminology and Public Policy 11:1:21-50.
Pickett, Justin T.; Thomas Loughran and Shawn Bushway (2016). "Consequences of Legal Risk Communication for Sanction Perception Updating and White-Collar Criminality," Journal of Experimental Criminology 12:1:75-104.
Denver, Megan, Justin Pickett and Shawn Bushway (2017). "The Language of Stigmatization and the Mark of Violence: Experimental Evidence on the Social Construction and Use of Criminal Record Stigma," Criminology 55:3:664-690.
Kurlychek, Megan, Robert Brame and Shawn Bushway (2006). "Scarlet Letters and Recidivism: Does An Old Criminal Record Predict Future Offending?" Criminology and Public Policy 5:3:483-504.
Other
Watch for more on desistance signaling: Institute for Research on Poverty - University of Wisconsin