Photo courtesy of Jim Harrison for Harvard Magazine
Bruce Western is the Bryce Professor of Sociology and Social Justice, and the Co-Director of the Justice Lab at Columbia University. Western studies the relationship between political institutions and social and economic inequality. He has longstanding interests in criminal justice policy, incarceration, and the effects of incarceration on poor communities. His research on economic inequality has analyzed labor unions and their effects on income inequality, and trends in income inequality and mobility in the United States. In his work on quantitative methods, Western has also developed applications of Bayesian statistics to sociology. Besides his academic publications, he has also for The Nation, The Hill, The Boston Globe, the Boston Review, Foreign Affairs, the Marshall Project, USA Today and a variety of other outlets.
In recent projects, Western served as the Vice Chair of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Causes and Consequences of High Incarceration Rates in the United States, and was the principal investigator on the Harvard Executive Session on Community Corrections, sponsored by the National Institute of Justice. He is also the principal investigator of the Boston Reentry Study, a longitudinal study of formerly-incarcerated men and women returning to the Boston area.
Western received his B.A. with first class honors in government from the University of Queensland, Australia in 1986, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1993. Before moving to Harvard, he taught at Princeton University from 1993 to 2007. His book Punishment and Inequality in America won the 2007 Albert J. Reiss Award from the Crime Law and Deviance Section of the American Sociological Association and the 2008 Michael J. Hindelang Award for the most outstanding contribution to research on criminology from the American Society of Criminology. His new book, Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison, was published in 2018.
If you’d like to contact Bruce, please submit an inquiry here.
In the media
In this animated interview with The Atlantic, I explain the current inevitability of prison for certain demographics of young black men and how it's become a normal life event.
Recent publication
My recent paper for the Square One Project’s Executive Session on the Future of Justice Policy. Read more here.