Born in Australia, Western received his Bachelor in government with honors from the University of Queensland in 1987. He subsequently received his masters" and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1990 and 1993, respectively.
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." 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.
Another study co-authored by Pettit and Western found that on average, incarceration reduces annual salaries by about 40% for the average male former prisoner.
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.
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, Junior. Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association. Western was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in 2015.
