Bruce Western
Bruce Western, Co-Founder and Director of The Justice Lab and Bryce Professor of Sociology and Social Justice, Columbia University; Co-Founder, The Square One Project
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 U.S. incarceration. With Jeremy Travis, Bruce co-founded the Square One Project that aims to re-imagine the public policy response to violence under conditions of poverty and racial inequality. In 2022 he co-chaired a National Academy of Sciences panel on reducing racial inequality in the U.S. criminal justice system and in 2014 was the Vice-Chair of the NAS panel on high rates of incarceration in the United States.
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). Bruce is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received his Ph.D. in 1993 in Sociology from UCLA.