Bruce Western is the Bryce Professor of Sociology and Social Justice and Director of the Justice Lab at Columbia University. He studies poverty and socioeconomic inequality with a focus on the U.S. criminal justice system. Current projects include a randomized experiment assessing the effects of criminal justice fines and fees on misdemeanor defendants in Oklahoma City, and a field study of solitary confinement in Pennsylvania state prisons. Western is also the Principal Investigator of the Square One Project that aims to re-imagine the public policy response to violence under conditions of poverty and racial inequality. He is the Co-Chair of a National Academy of Sciences panel on reducing racial inequality in the U.S. criminal justice system. He is the author of Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison (Russell Sage Foundation, 2018), and Punishment and Inequality in America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006).
He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. Western received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and was born in Canberra, Australia.
