Bruce Western

Professor of Sociology, Harvard Kennedy School

Bruce Western is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Western's work has focused on the role of incarceration in social and economic inequality in American society. He shows the link between incarceration and unemployment, which therefore leads to inequality. With a strong background in statistics and quantitative methods, Western has widely utilized Bayesian analysis in his work. Western's first book Between Class and Market: Postwar Unionization in the Capitalist Democracies (Princeton University Press, 1997) concerned the growth and decline of unions in capitalist democracies. In this volume, Western argues that unions declined in countries without centralized labor markets, union control over the administration of unemployment policies, and strong working class parties. His research includes extensive quantitative and qualitative methodologies. In his second book Punishment and Inequality in America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), Western asks what role incarceration plays in the increasing class stratification of American society. He shows that the elevated numbers of incarcerated African Americans in the 1990s have caused a rift in African American society, and that those with less education are increasingly separated from those with higher education. The book also describe further economic effects of mass incarceration: by removing large numbers of poorly educated young men from the labor market, statistics on wages and unemployment were artificially skewed.

Western received his B.A. in government from the University of Queensland, Australia, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Western was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2005, and a Jean Monnet Fellow with the European University Institute between 1995 and 1996, and is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the James F. Short Jr. distinguished article award, Crime, Law and Deviance Section of the American Sociological Association in 2006 for his article "Black-White Wage Inequality, Employment Rates, and Incarceration." 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. He is currently co-chair of a task force on the challenge of mass incarceration for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served on the council of the American Sociological Association.