More than 700,000 people leave U.S. prisons each year, mostly returning to poor communities in urban areas. In this podcast, Bruce Western discusses early findings from his Boston Reentry Study that show prison precipitates a transition to severe poverty for a fragile population with often-traumatic histories of childhood exposure to violence.

Bruce Western is professor of sociology and director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Western's recent work has focused on the link between social inequality and the growth of prison and jail population in the United States.

This podcast is part of the Neil A. Weiner Research Speaker Series.