Bruce Western

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Bruce Prichart Western (born July 1, 1964) is an Australian-born American sociologist and the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy at Harvard University. He is also the director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard, and the faculty chair of the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He has been called "one of the leading academic experts on American incarceration."

Video Bruce Western

Early life and education

Western was born in Australia, to a white native Australian father who taught at the University of Queensland, and a Thai international student mother. He became interested in inequality in Australia growing up in Queensland, where he, his brother, and their mother stood out as racial minorities. He received his B.A. in government with honors from the University of Queensland in 1987. He subsequently received his masters' and Ph.D. degrees in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1990 and 1993, respectively.

Maps Bruce Western

Career

After receiving his PhD, Western taught at Princeton University for fourteen years. He then joined Harvard in 2007 as a professor of sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the director of the Kennedy School's Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy.

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Research

Prisons and mass incarceration

Originally, Western's research pertained to organized labor, but he became interested in researching prisons and mass incarceration, in his words, "almost by accident" after talking to a colleague about the United States' use of prisons to manage disadvantaged populations. As of 2008, he had written or co-written more than a dozen articles about prisons, as well as a book ("Punishment and Inequality in America") on the same topic. In "Punishment and Inequality in America", originally published in 2006, he concludes that "mass imprisonment has erased many of the "gains to African American citizenship hard won by the civil rights movement."" In a 2010 study, Western and fellow sociologist Becky Pettit outlined the way in which, according to them, poverty increases prison populations and these populations in turn increase poverty. Other studies co-authored by Pettit and Western have found that on average, incarceration reduces annual salaries by about 40% for the average male former prisoner, and reduces hourly wages by,on average, 11% and annual employment by nine weeks. As of 2013, Western was also studying what happens to prisoners after they are released, and has interviewed the subjects of the study in person, which has, according to Elizabeth Gudrais, "put a human face on the statistics and dashed preconceived notions in the process." In 2015, he published a study based on these interviews, showing that 40% of the recently incarcerated prisoners he interviewed in the Boston area had witnessed a killing when they were children. Another finding of his research on these released prisoners was that most of them immediately return to poverty upon their release.

Unions

He has also researched the relationship between the decline of unions and increasing income inequality, and has found that the former accounted for a third of the increase in income inequality among male workers.

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Honors and awards

In 2005, while on the faculty of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, Western received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his project, "The Growth and Consequences of American Inequality." His book "Punishment and Inequality in America" won both the 2008 Michael J. Hindelang Book Award from the American Society of Criminology and the 2007 Albert J. Reiss, Jr. Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association. Western was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in 2015.

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Personal life

As of 2008, Western lived in Brookline, Massachusetts with his wife and three daughters.

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References

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External links

• Faculty page at the John F. Kennedy School of Government website
• Faculty page at the Harvard University Department of Sociology website

Source of the article : Wikipedia