Bruce Western is Professor of Sociology and the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy. He is the Director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy and the Faculty Chair of the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Western's research broadly 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.