Word: blumstein
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...opposite extreme, some liberal educators question the value of imposing a universal curriculum for students. It would be impossible to define a "single program of study that is good for everyone," says Dean of Brown College Sheila E. Blumstein, given the variation of student abilities and interests...
Since the highest involvement in crime occurs among young men from the ages of 15 to 18, urbanologists like Alfred Blumstein of Pittsburgh's Carnegie- Mellon University expected the crime rate to decline along with the number of teenagers. The tail end of the baby boom reached age 16 in 1977, and Blumstein predicted that the crime rate would top out a few years later, followed by a peak in the prison population as the younger hoods got enough convictions to land in jail. Sure enough, after 1980 the crime rate began declining on schedule, and the U.S. prison population...
That trend, though, seems to have reversed itself: the crime rate rose again in 1985 and early 1986. Blumstein offers this explanation: while there are fewer young males generally, there has been a disproportionate increase of males in the underclass. This group, with all its attendant ills of poverty, alienation and broken homes, is particularly prone to criminal behavior. "What we're seeing," says Blumstein, "is a changing social-class composition, and crime correlates with social class...
This is only part of the answer, says Carnegie-Mellon University Professor Alfred Blumstein. The full explanation, he says, is "demographics plus toughness." Many criminal-justice experts are disturbed by the rigid form that the new toughness has taken. Since the mid-1970s nearly all states have passed some form of mandatory sentencing legislation-that is, laws stipulating that offenders convicted of certain crimes, or of a succession of crimes, must go to prison. In New York, for instance, the prisoner explosion is partly the result of a 1978 law requiring judges to imprison all violent-felony offenders...
Last week, as the martial law regime decreed the biggest consumer price hikes in Poland's postwar history and Jaruzelski prepared to outline his future programs before parliament, Solidarity activists operating abroad angrily defended the union from charges of extremism. Said Severin Blumstein, 35, a member of a Paris-based group of Solidarity exiles: "It's amazing! To have democratic countries question the right of other countries to that very same democracy they take for granted strikes me as a cynical viewpoint...