Remembering A Sentencing Giant
A scholar, a pioneer in quantitative criminology, a sentencing commissioner, and a good man
Earlier this year, America lost a sentencing legend. Professor Al Blumstein died on January 13, 2026, at the age of 95. The New York Times properly lauded him as “an intellectual giant.” All of us should know about Al because he revolutionized our field starting in the 1960s and continued to do so for nearly 60 years.
Al coined the phrase “criminal justice system,” and his revolutionary work spanned the breadth of that system. As his colleague at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) told the Times, “[Al] really identified the connections that people hadn’t thought about before.” Despite his broad impact, I think it is fair for the sentencing world to claim him as our own.
In 1965, Al directed the Science and Technology Task Force for the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, which culminated in the famous volume The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society. It was during this project that Al created the now-famous criminal justice flowchart.
It reflects Al’s training in operations research and has been a helpful guide and tool for generations of students, scholars, and practitioners ever since.
Al’s work specifically on sentencing was equally as significant and groundbreaking. For example, he led the National Research Council’s landmark study Research on Sentencing: The Search for Reform (1983). In his Preface to that report, Al wrote, “Sentencing … involves many complex philosophical questions relating to the role of punishment in society, to the appropriate form of punishment, and to the symbolic qualities of punishment.” (p. xii). The chapter on sentencing policies and prison populations includes this passage:
One of the important consequences of changes in sentencing policies is their impact on prison populations. … The panel examined the relationship between sentencing policies and prison populations because anticipation of the impact on prison of existing and alternative sentencing policies makes explicit the choices among levels of punitiveness and their costs and is an important aid to responsible policy making. (p. 225).
Even today, jurisdictions continue to grapple with the interaction between sentencing policies and prison capacity. Al and his team were on the vanguard of that discussion. The report also laid out a research agenda for sentencing, which, when reread in 2026, demonstrates how much (and how little) we have accomplished in the intervening decades.
Throughout his career, Al worked hard to bring science and data to sentencing. For example, he advocated loudly and repeatedly against the different treatment of crack versus powder cocaine in federal mandatory minimum sentences. He wrote a compelling article on that topic for the Federal Sentencing Reporter in 2003, entitled “The Notorious 100:1 Crack: Powder Disparity—The Data Tell Us that It Is Time to Restore the Balance.” After methodically describing the data about such things as the replacement effect of people who sell drugs and changing patterns of violence associated with the market for crack, Al observed as follows: “I see no clear reason why there should be any difference in sentencing guidelines between crack and powder.” That was Al. Not flashy. Not glib. Just marshaling the data in service of a just outcome.
Al also conducted crucial research into criminal careers and patterns of offending that are deeply relevant to sentencing laws and sentencing guidelines. In 2009, Al and Kiminori Nakamura published an article in Criminology entitled “Redemption in the Presence of Widespread Criminal Background Checks” that provided empirical support for the idea that — at a certain point — previously convicted individuals can be “redeemed” and present no more risk of future criminal conduct than people without a criminal history. The connection to sentencing guidelines and their treatment of criminal history (let alone the clean slate movement) is obvious.
Al taught at what is now the Heinz College of Public Policy and Management at CMU beginning in 1968. From 1986 to 1993, he served as the College’s Dean. Over the course of his career, Al Blumstein received innumerable awards and honors. For example, he was the President of the American Society of Criminology, where his Presidential Address was entitled, “Making Rationality Relevant.” He also received the American Society of Criminology’s Sutherland Award (1987) and the Stockholm Prize in Criminology (2007). In short, Al was a big deal and had been a big deal for decades.
Al was also active in the Pennsylvania criminal justice system. From 1979 to 1990, he was the Chairman of the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency. It was through a Pennsylvania connection that I learned more about Al.
From 2002 to 2015, it was my honor to serve as the then-Gubernatorial appointee to the law professor or criminologist seat on the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing. For my last two years, I served as the Chair of the Commission. I knew when I was appointed that the position carried great responsibility for the continual improvement of the Commonwealth’s criminal justice system. Or, in the language of the statute, make recommendations in pursuit of “effective, humane and rational sentencing, resentencing and parole policy.” 42 PA Cons Stat § 2153(a)(12).
But my job carried a heavier weight. From 1986 to 1996, Al Blumstein held the professorial appointment to the Commission. He left those of us who followed him big shoes to fill. I never succeeded in doing so, but Al was such a legendary figure that he always inspired me to try harder and do better. A prominent sentencing scholar from the University of Minnesota, Richard Frase, captured it perfectly at a conference when he once referred to me as occupying the “Al Blumstein seat” on the Commission. It remains a perfect description. Four of us have been in that role since Al left, but for my money, it remains the “Al Blumstein seat.”
Even after leaving the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing, Al remained engaged with and supportive of the Commission for the rest of his life. For example, he forged a collaboration between the Commission and his master’s level students at CMU. Some of those very bright students devoted their capstone course to a System Synthesis Project focused on a complicated policy issue facing the Commission. Over the years, CMU students (under the guidance of Al and other talented CMU faculty members) advised the Commission on approximately 8 to 10 projects.
Around 2013, the Commission started a Strategic Planning Work Group to chart a path forward and reevaluate the guidelines from top to bottom. Al was invited to join and quickly agreed. Unsurprisingly, he offered penetrating insights and suggested innovative solutions. His influence can be found in various aspects of what ultimately became the 8th Edition of the Pennsylvania Sentencing Guidelines, including a de-emphasis on criminal history generally and the introduction of lapsing and decay mechanisms for criminal history. At one meeting near the end of the multi-year strategic planning process, the Commission’s then-Executive Director Mark Bergstrom presented Al with a cake celebrating the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice.
I have long partnered with the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing and the Administrative Office of the Pennsylvania Courts to run the Villanova Sentencing Workshop every spring semester. One part of the Workshop involves dinner speakers. We have had an all-star cast of speakers over the years, including a former Governor, multiple Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justices, Secretaries of Corrections, Parole Board Chairs, Pennsylvania legislators, formerly incarcerated individuals, academics, and more. Just weeks before the COVID shutdown in February 2020, Al — at about the age of 90 — made the trip from Pittsburgh to be with us. He was probably supposed to be at some other convention, but he was with us. He was as sharp as ever and discussed his still-crucial work on criminal careers and redemption. That was Al. Always showing up. Always brilliant.
But there is one more thing you should know.
He was always kind.
Remember, Al was a big deal. I mean a really big deal. Yet he was the most unassuming, generous, and supportive colleague (if I have the temerity to call him a colleague) you can imagine. Here’s a modest example. Even though I’m a law professor, I enjoy attending the American Society of Criminology annual meeting from time to time, as criminologists care about the same issues lawyers and judges do, but use different tools and strategies to address them. This meeting draws thousands of researchers from around the world. Especially in that setting, Al was a celebrity. He was in high demand. I went to one of those meetings as a new professor more than 20 years ago. Of course, I knew about Al. Everyone did. There was no reason he should have known me. By that time, I may have helped edit his FSR piece on crack and was a member of the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing, but we hadn’t had any significant interactions. Yet I saw Al in one of the conference meeting rooms. I gathered up the courage to approach Al and ask him about some pedestrian paper or theory I had in my head. He stopped what he was doing, focused on me, and seriously engaged with my questions. Even when he saw flaws in my approach (and there were many), his comments were constructive. He was both rigorous and supportive. Obviously, that kindness has stuck with me for nearly a quarter century.
You may wonder why. Everyone should be kind, right? And we should. But as a group, we often aren’t. That is especially true, I’m sad to say, in academia. People who become big deals in the academy too often believe their own press and are aloof, dismissive, and sometimes downright rude to those they consider “beneath” them. That may be why Al’s kindness — his decency — made such an impact on so many during his long career.
It is hard to overstate Al’s significance to criminal justice in Pennsylvania, in the United States, and around the world. It may be a cliché, but sometimes clichés become clichés because there is truth at their core. Thanks to Al Blumstein, all of us who toil in the vineyards of the criminal justice system have the privilege of standing on the shoulders of a giant.
Here’s to Al Blumstein. May his memory be a blessing.
