Review Symposium

Bruce Western has produced some superb quantitative empirical research in the past decade and a half, from his early work on corporatism, unions and wages (e.g. Western, 1991, 1997; Western and Healy, 1999) to his more recent study of the causes and consequences of incarceration in the United States, of which Punishment and Inequality in America is the culmination. The topics are important. Research questions are clearly posed. Data and measures are selected with care. The analysis often features state-of-the-art quantitative techniques, but the question and the theory, rather than the statistical tools, drive the analysis. The empirical investigation usually includes multiple sources of analytical leverage—cross-section and over-time, macro and micro, comparative and case study. Conclusions are expressed cautiously, with explicit reference to the degree and sources of uncertainty (which include much more than the usual uncertainty about sample-to-population inference). One can learn a great deal from this work not only about the substantive issue at hand but also about how to do and convey top-notch empirical social science. Punishment and Inequality in America examines a variety of issues central to debates about crime and criminal justice, most notably the determinants of the growth in incarceration in the United States since the 1970s (Chapter 3) and the impact of incarceration on the drop in crime during the 1990s