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Body Count: Moral Poverty . . . and How to Win America's War Against Crime and Drugs
By William J. Bennett, John J. Dilulio, and John P. Walters
Simon & Schuster
271 pp.; $24
Though he hasn't yet turned 40, John J. DiIulio, Jr., is one of the nation's leading experts in the field of criminal justice. Professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University, Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow and director of the Brookings Institution's Center for Public Management, and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, DiIulio carries an impressive list of academic credentials, including a number of scholarly publications. He is also a widely quoted public intellectual whose essays appear regularly in the Weekly Standard, The New Republic, National Review, and other leading journals of opinion.
DiIulio was one of the first to sound the warning about the now widely acknowledged increase in juvenile crime. In particular, he has drawn attention to the young criminals--mostly male--whom he calls "super-predators," characterized by violent impulsiveness and a chilling lack of empathy or remorse. Because he writes and speaks about crime without employing fashionable evasions, DiIulio has been harshly criticized by some of his scholarly peers, but he does not belong in anybody's political pigeonhole. As James Traub observed in a New Yorker profile (Nov. 4, 1996),
Besides being a tenured Ivy League professor, he is a Democrat who has sharply, and publicly, attacked the Contract with America and the new welfare law. He may be the only academic in the country who could say, as he did in a speech earlier this year, "It is no more true that most welfare recipients are lazy, undeserving people than it is true that most prisoners are mere first-time nonviolent criminals."
Lately DiIulio has been working with a coalition of black ministers who believe that churches, given adequate funds, are the best hope--maybe the only hope--for neglected and abused kids in the inner city. Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center met with DiIulio in Philadelphia to talk about that ongoing work and about DiIulio's new book, Body Count, coauthored with William Bennett and John P. Walters.
You have said America is sitting on a ticking demographic crime bomb. Can you explain that to us?
In 1994 there were 2.7 million arrests of persons under age 18, up from 1.7 million in 1991; 150,000 of those arrests of juveniles were for violent crimes. Juveniles are now responsible for ever-larger shares of both property and violent crime. If you look at the estimates by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, they will tell you that by the year 2010 we'll have about 4,500,000 more boys, males under the age of 18, in the population than we had in 1990. Even if the increase isn't that big, even if fertility rates nationally trend downward as some people suggest they well might, almost everyone believes that there is going to be an increase in the number of at-risk juvenile males: kids who are basically unsupervised, not in homes where they are given the most rudimentary education.
A good proxy for what's going to happen down the road is rates of child abuse and neglect. We know that, all other things being equal, child maltreatment will increase the chances of delinquency by about 40 percent. That sheer demographic effect is going to have an impact. Lots of other things could happen to mitigate the situation: law enforcement changes, social-policy changes--all sorts of other things can make a difference; it's a multi-variant world. But ultimately, I think, the news is not very good.
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