Bradley Bartos

Interests

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Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Chapters

• Bartos, B., McCleary, R., & Mcdowall, D. (2023). Time Series Designs. In APA handbook of research methods in psychology: Research designs: Quantitative, qualitative, neuropsychological, and biological(pp 763–784). American Psychological Association. doi:10.1037/0000319-034

Journals/Publications

• Bartos, B. J. (2023). Effecting change in the aftermath of school shootings. Science Advances, 9(51). doi:10.1126/sciadv.adn2625
• Kubrin, C. E., & Bartos, B. J. (2023). The COVID-19 Pandemic, Prison Downsizing, and Crime Trends. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 40(1), 113-137. doi:10.1177/10439862231190206
• Renner, M., & Bartos, B. (2022). Decarceration, Sanction Severity and Crime: Causal Analysis of Proposition 47 and Property Crime in Los Angeles. Justice Evaluation Journal, 5(2), 149-171. doi:10.1080/24751979.2021.1996207
• Bartos, B. J., Kubrin, C. E., Newark, C., & McCleary, R. (2019). Medical marijuana laws and suicide. Archives of suicide research, 24(2), 204-217. doi:10.1080/13811118.2019.1612803
• Bartos, B. J., McCleary, R., Mazerolle, L., & Luengen, K. (2020). Controlling Gun Violence: Assessing the Impact of Australia’s Gun Buyback Program Using a Synthetic Control Group Experiment. Prevention science, 21(1), 131--136.
• Gravel, J., Bartos, B. J., & Delgado, M. K. (2020). 211 Unintended consequences of carrying firearms in vehicles on firearm thefts: an analysis of Tennessee’s 2014 legal change. Injury Prevention, 26(Suppl 1), A36.
• Kubrin, C. E., & Bartos, B. J. (2020). Sanctuary Status and Crime in California: What’s the Connection?. Justice Evaluation Journal, 3(2), 115--133. doi:10.1080/24751979.2020.1745662
• Bartos, B., & McCleary, R. (2019). Tautology in Criminological Theory. Available at SSRN 3418629.
• Bartos, B. J., & Kubrin, C. E. (2018). Can we downsize our prisons and jails without compromising public safety? Findings from California's Prop 47. Criminology & Public Policy, 17(3), 693--715.
• Bartos, B. J., Mazerolle, L., & McCleary, R. (2018). Life and death decisions: estimating the causal impact of Australia’s gun buyback program on homicide and suicide.
• Bartos, B. J., Newark, C., & McCleary, R. (2018). Marijuana medicalization and motor vehicle fatalities: a synthetic control group approach. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 1--18.

Presentations

• Kubrin, C., & Bartos, B. (2023). The COVID-19 Pandemic, Decarceration, and Crime Trends. American Society of Criminology Annual Conference. Philadelphia, PA.
• Bartos, B. (2022, February). The Debt Crisis, Austerity Measures, and Suicide in Greece. Western Society of Criminology. Honolulu, HI.
• Bartos, B. J., & Renner, M. (2021, November). Decarceration and Deterrence: A Causal Analysis of Proposition 47 and Property Crime in Los Angeles. American Society of Criminology 2021 Annual Meeting. Chicago, IL.
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  In Event: Deterrence, Decisions, and Criminal Justice PolicyAbstractObjectives: We examine the effects of Proposition 47 a decarcerative policy which decreased the severity of criminal sanctions for property crime through the lens of deterrence theory.Methods: Difference in difference, triple difference, and synthetic control group methods are used to produce main results. Various methods are used to evaluate sensitivity and robustness of effect size estimates.Results: Within-city and between city analyses produce robust evidence that Prop 47 increased property crime, especially shoplifting, in Los Angeles. Results also contain strong indications that part of this increase is attributable to deterrence rather than incapacitation.Conclusions: The study shows that under specific circumstances decarcerative policies may lead to increases in crime through reduced deterrence. Despite this, we ultimately conclude, with the benefit of a growing body of literature on Prop 47, that the policy was effective in limiting these increases to anticipated, and less serious forms of crime.
• Bartos, B., Kubrin, C., & McCleary, R. (2021, November). The Debt Crisis, Austerity Measures and Suicide in Greece. American Society of Criminology's 2022 Annual Meeting. Chicago, IL.
• Bartos, B. (2019, November). Scaling Transformations and Standardization: Implications for Time-series Matching Methods. The American Society of Criminology Annual Conference,. San Francisco, CA.
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  Time-series matching methods, such difference-in-differences and synthetic control group designs, aim to identify or construct a control time-series that represents the treated unit “had the intervention not occurred”. While a control time series that satisfies the parallel trends assumption is rarely available in nature, it can sometimes be approximated as a weighted combination of untreated “donor pool” units. The weights assigned to untreated units are selected by a matching algorithm intended to minimize the pre-intervention differences between the treated unit and its constructed synthetic control series. Since the weights are constrained to be non-negative and sum to one, the synthetic control unit cannot extrapolate beyond the range of values contained in the donor pool. This constraint can be relaxed through scaling transformations, of which per capita rates are most common to researchers. Although population-based rates work quite well for health outcomes when every living human has the potential to contribute an occurrence of the outcome, many criminological outcomes require some antecedent behavior or material pre-condition in order for them to occur. Using a state-level panel of annual motor vehicle fatalities between 1975 and 2015, the current study demonstrates the non-trivial impact scaling factors can produce in synthetic control group estimates.

Creative Productions

• Kubrin, C., & Bartos, B. (2024. Decarceration and Crime Do Not Go Hand in Hand. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/decarceration-and-crime-do-not-go-hand-in-hand1/
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  The pandemic provided a natural experiment, one that suggests fewer people in jail does not lead to more crime.

Others

• Bartos, B. J. (2020). Methodological Foundations of the Synthetic Control Group Design: Formalizing Model Construction for Case Study Applications in the Social Sciences.
• McDowall, D., McCleary, R., & Bartos, B. J. (2019). Interrupted time series analysis.
• McCleary, R., McDowall, D., & Bartos, B. (2017). Design and Analysis of Time Series Experiments.