If there's one thing that tweaks Alfred Blumstein, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who is among the nation's leading criminologists, it's a sound bite approach to understanding the complexities of crime in America. But every time a new study comes out, the reporters call Blumstein, a bespectacled, energetic 69, and ask him what he thinks. His answer is usually one of restraint, tempered by years of crunching numbers and trying to figure out what they mean. There are grays out there. I live in the grays.
Ideologues deal in extremes, but life is shades of gray.
These are complicated issues. That isn't to say Blumstein, director of the National Consortium on Violence Research at Carnegie Mellon, is shy about his opinions. Last month, a provocative study linking the legalization of abortion in the 1970s with the declining crime rate in the United States captured the nation's attention. The authors, Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago and John Donohue III of Stanford University Law School, argued that many people who would have been criminals of the 1990s were never born because they were aborted in the 1970s. Legalized abortion, they said, may explain as much as half of the overall crime reduction between 1991 and 1997.