Alfred Blumstein '51, Ph.D. '60, a self-described "missionary" of operations research to the criminal justice system, has spent 40 years offering a systems perspective for informing decisions and policies in crime-reduction efforts, incarceration and cost effectiveness.

Blumstein, the J. Erik Jonsson University Professor of Urban Systems and Operations Research at Carnegie Mellon University, described his research at a recent meeting of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Boston chapter.

Blumstein's work over the past 20 years has covered such aspects of the criminal justice system as crime measurement, criminal careers, sentencing, deterrence and incapacitation, prison populations, demographic trends, juvenile violence and drug-enforcement policy.

During his talk at INFORMS, Blumstein, who received his bachelor's degree from Cornell in engineering physics and Ph.D. in operations research, described how feedback modeling of criminal careers has led to a number of policy insights in recent years, such as the notion that sentencing decisions should take into account the "residual career length" of convicted law-breakers to avoid wasting prison space.

He noted that the primary factors driving growth in prison populations have not been increases in crime or arrest rates, but in length of sentences and in the proportion of arrests resulting in prison. He also discussed the unintended consequences of incarceration -- an increase in drug offenders in prison, recruitment of young replacements by crack markets, the proliferation of guns to protect the markets and the tendency of young men to "resolve disputes by fighting" with much more lethal weaponry. In fact, Blumstein posited, the entire homicide rise from 1985 to 1993 can be explained by the increase in killings by young people with handguns, many in the drug trade.

In addition to his role as an eminent criminologist, Blumstein has served as president of the Operations Research Society of America, the Institute of Management Sciences and the organization resulting from their merger -- INFORMS. In 1998 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He and his colleague, psychologist Terrie E. Moffitt, were awarded the 2007 Stockholm Prize in Criminology for their work on the analysis of criminal careers -- the first Americans to win this prestigious prize.

This article is adapted from a piece that originally ran on the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering news Web site. For more ORIE news, visit http:www.orie.cornell.edu/news/news.