The controversial criminal-justice scholar, who coined the term “superpredator,” is on a crusade to see that his dire predictions of skyrocketing youth crime don’t come true.
By Mary Ann Meyers
BY THE TIME A Southwest Philly corner boy and sometime house painter nicknamed “Dool” graduated from Penn in 1980 with a BA in economics and political science and an MA in political science and public policy, the possibility of his getting an “indoor” job looked pretty good. Awarded tenure at Princeton University just two years after earning a Ph.D. at Harvard, John James DiIulio, Jr. had published several books and numerous articles and newspaper op-ed pieces on criminal-justice issues when he was thrust into the public eye last year over his coining of the term “super-predator” to describe the most violent and remorseless young criminal offenders. The resulting controversy made the 38-year old political scientist a sufficiently emblematic figure to earn a profile in The New Yorker magazine — which duly noted that his “work gives many of his peers fits.”
DiIulio turned up in the pages of The New Yorker again early last summer in an article by Joe Klein, C’68. That piece had to do with a growing movement in urban- policy circles to, as the magazine’s contents page blurb put it, “let the churches have the inner cities,” and DiIulio was introduced as a leading proponent. Churches are the most efficacious institutions operating in distressed communities, he says, and leveraging their financial and human investments holds out the best hope of preventing another explosion of juvenile crime. DiIulio began doing the research and reflection that led him to this view in early 1994, and since the fall of 1995 — when he went on half-time leave from Princeton — he has been working with inner-city ministries, studying their programs for successful models and assisting them in attracting funding. Having been “coerced by the data” revealed in his own and others’ research, he says, “morally and intellectually” he hasn’t any other choice.
“It is increasingly clear that the presence of active religious institutions mediates crime by affecting the behavior of disadvantaged youth,” says DiIulio. “A recent study found that controlling for all relevant individual characteristics, such as race, gender, education, and family structure, urban young people whose neighbors attend church are more likely to have a job, less likely to use drugs, and less likely to be involved in criminal activity. Inner-city ministries are centers of social health and vitality on America’s meanest streets.”
DiIulio — cradle Catholic, Democrat — actually can’t be pigeonholed on either side of the political spectrum. Both right and left have cited his research in support of their remedies for civic ills. He is up front and outspoken about the social benefits of incarceration, believing that locking up more convicted criminals for longer terms reduces crime. The sweeping 1994 federal crime law, which provided hundreds of millions of dollars for new prison construction, was influenced by his views. On the other hand, he is also among the architects of the federal prison system’s prison-based drug treatment programs.
For DiIulio, the fight against urban crime demands a whole arsenal of weapons. He supports swift and sure punishment for chronic violent offenders, but he is convinced that the only real hope of turning back the tide of murder, assault, rape, and robbery is early intervention in the lives of youngsters trapped in the most deprived neighborhoods. “In the end, what is even more important than making cities safe is saving children,” he says.
DiIulio takes little comfort in the heralded six-year drop in reported crime, which fell three percent in 1996, with especially big reductions in New York and Los Angeles, following a nine percent plunge in 1995. As of September, Boston had not had a gun-related youth homicide since July 1995, he notes, “largely because of the partnerships struck between police, probation, and our network of clergy in preventing youth violence.” Even Philadelphia, which had lagged behind other big cities in seeing crime statistics fall, experienced a 17 percent drop during the first half of 1997 (“In part, but only in part, the result of changes in reporting practices,” DiIulio adds).
ARGUING AGAINST complacency, however, DiIulio says that crime is undercounted nationally and, even taking government figures at face value, “serious crime is still far above 1960 levels.” Furthermore, he emphasizes that “criminal acts of violence are mostly committed by young men.” Since the late 1980s, the rate of arrests for serious crime among the bellwether male sub-group of 14- to 17-year olds has risen rapidly. “It went up 59 percent, from 1.7 million arrests to 2.7 million, between 1991 and 1994,” DiIulio says. But that isn’t the most worrisome news. The proportion of young men in the population, which has been falling since 1980, is about to head up again. “The teenage population will top 30 million by 2006, the highest number since 1975,” DiIulio says. “By anybody’s calculation we have a bigger cohort of kids on the horizon and a larger fraction of that bigger cohort will consist of at-risk youth.”
He is convinced, moreover, that all the adverse conditions that predispose adolescents to crime will only intensify as a result of the “morally outrageous” 1996 welfare reform law. Before the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, “It was not theoretically possible for any child in the United States to be without food, shelter, and medical care. We made a decision in the 1930s, and reaffirmed it in the 1960s, that we would nationalize certain individual and collective life risks. But now, at a time in our country’s history when we have achieved the highest level of wealth that any nation has ever achieved — and when most Americans are better off than they were 25 years ago — we have said we feel unable to guarantee, to every child, subsistence levels of basic necessities,” DiIulio says. “Anyone who thinks that taking away food stamps and Medicaid, without massive spending on work programs, won’t have an effect on the propensity of kids without jobs, or hope of them, to act violently is living in a dream world.”
DiIulio pronounces himself “totally unimpressed” by recent reports that welfare rolls have dropped 25 percent nationally. First, he notes, the rolls rose 30 percent in the early 1990s. The majority of cases who have gone off welfare consist of more skilled workers with some job history, he adds, and they can’t actually be credited to the impact of the federal welfare bill because the law has not yet begun to “bite.” Also, “We know virtually nothing about what’s happened to those who have left the rolls. Did they get and keep living wage jobs? Are they back on assistance? What?” As for the reform’s value as a deterrent to out-of-wedlock births among welfare recipients, DiIulio cites a forthcoming Rutgers University study showing the same rate (about 12-13 percent) for both those subject to welfare caps and a control group. He also “remains concerned about how recent changes in Medicaid policy will affect the urban poor,” the subject of a book he co-edited that will be published in a few months by the Brookings Institution. Finally, DiIulio says, “My ethical objection remains unalterable by either empirical evidence or policy changes: We ought not to make it theoretically possible for poor children to be without any certain means of food, money, or medicine.”
DiIulio’s social welfare philosophy has its roots in his family’s history. Three of his four grandparents were Italian immigrants. His maternal grandmother, with whom he and his parents lived until he was seven, was a “mail-order bride” from Abruzzi who came to the United States in the early 1920s to marry her brother’s friend, a widowed printer. During the Depression, they were on relief. DiIulio remembers his grandmother going to Mass every morning and lighting three candles — one for a son who died in a childhood accident, one for a son who was killed in action in World War II, and one for President Roosevelt. Her house was in South Philadelphia, in a solid working-class neighborhood that became poorer and rougher as she grew older. Even after she was mugged twice, she refused to move, and her grandson remembers her telling him that the boys who stole her purse and broke her ribs “were just like us, except the Americans didn’t help them.”
AFTER HE FINISHED second grade, DiIulio and his family moved to a house of their own in Southwest Philadelphia. His father was a sheriff’s deputy, and his mother worked in fifth-floor dinettes at the former Strawbridge and Clothier’s for 30 years. He attended a parochial elementary school, Saint Barnabas, and then the Haverford School on Philadelphia’s Main Line on a partial scholarship.
DiIulio rode three buses to get to the school, and when he did, he experienced “total culture shock.” He didn’t talk like the other boys, and he didn’t dress like them, except for the regulation maroon and yellow tie. A serious weightlifter, he made friends mostly with the school jocks and with a Jewish doctor’s son who, he says, was the first person he ever knew well “who wasn’t Italian, Irish, Polish, or African-American.” He also kept in close touch with his old friends from St. Barnabas. Today, it is these men and their families with whom he goes to DiNardo’s restaurant in Old City for crabs and often shares holidays and vacations.
DiIulio never worked hard enough at Haverford to excel academically. No one in his family had ever gone to college, so higher education wasn’t something he thought much about; in fact, he says, he was considering trying to get a construction job or maybe joining the Marines after graduation. His teachers suggested he apply to local schools like St. Joseph’s or LaSalle or Villanova Universities. “But I decided that if I was going to go on to college, I’d like to go to the best place in town, and I’d heard that was Penn,” DiIulio says. “Going away to school wasn’t an option, and neither was living on campus.”
Penn took him and gave him a scholarship. For four years, he commuted by trolley. He did construction work, too, after school, on weekends, and in the summer, as well as painting houses with the gang from St. Barnabas. He fitted in tutoring in West Philadelphia, and he began to put some real effort into his studies. He also found a mentor who persuaded him that knowledge might have a practical application. DiIulio describes Dr. Jack Nagel, professor of political science at Penn, as “demanding but kind.” After taking an undergraduate course with him, he registered for one of Nagel’s graduate seminars. Though only a sophomore, he received the highest grades in the class, according to his former teacher. Nagel says DiIulio had “an unusual combination of street smarts and developing sophistication.” He describes his former student as “a diamond in the rough.”
DiIulio had none of the ambivalence toward graduate school that he had had toward college. He says he was convinced “it was going to be a hell of a lot better than hanging off the fourth floor of somebody’s 100-year-old Victorian and asking for the primer.” Two books, Amateur Democrat and Varieties of Police Behavior, by James Q. Wilson, a leading social scientist then at Harvard, had impressed him greatly, so he decided he would like to study with Wilson.
Nagel encouraged him and Harvard awarded him a fellowship, so DiIulio married his Penn sweetheart, Rosalee Crasner, CGS’80, and the couple headed for Cambridge. Crasner took an MBA at Boston University, and she and DiIulio lived in Harvard’s North House, where he served as head resident tutor. His dissertation was a comparative study of prison management. While he was visiting a third-tier cell block in nearby Walpole Prison, two inmates pushed DiIulio backwards over a rail and rocked him for several excruciating minutes before letting him go. DiIulio fell forward, picked up his notebook, and continued his investigation of correctional facilities in Texas, Michigan, and California.
DiIulio had one job interview after earning his doctorate in 1986. It was at Princeton, where he gave a talk, and the next day the late Donald E. Stokes, then dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, called to offer him an assistant professorship in politics and public affairs. It was an easy sell — in part because Princeton was close to Philadelphia and put the DiIulios near their families and oldest friends.
NAGEL DESCRIBES John DiIulio’s rise in academe as “meteoric.” Shortly after the publication of his first book, Governing Prisons, he was awarded tenure at Princeton. No one had ever been granted a permanent position on the school’s political-science faculty so soon after earning a doctorate. At the time, DiIulio was on a leave of absence, having been appointed a Guest Scholar at The Brookings Institution for the 1988-89 academic year. That appointment enabled him to work on his second book, No Escape: The Future of American Corrections, published in 1991, the year he was promoted from associate to full professor.
It was about this time, DiIulio says, that “I decided I didn’t want to spend my life doing research inside lock-ups.” As an unpaid adviser to the management of Rikers Island, the multi-security-level jail complex in New York, he came in contact with young men in whom he could detect “hardly a flicker of human emotion.” He says “they seemed eerily disconnected from any reality beyond themselves.” Corrections officials, veteran police officers, and prosecutors in district attorneys’ offices told him there was something different about these young criminals. DiIulio concluded it was “the lack of any empathic impulse and a radically-shortened time horizon.”
Having returned to Princeton in 1989 as founding director of the Center of Domestic and Comparative Policy Studies, he co-authored a book entitled Improving Government Performance (1993) and collaborated with Wilson on the sixth edition of a classic text, American Government: Institutions and Policies (1995). Skilled at summarizing basic research and presenting it with clarity, he edited other books, contributed chapters, wrote dozens of articles in policy journals, issued reports, gave invited papers and lectures, provided testimony before House and Senate committees, and served on task forces, commissions, editorial boards, and advisory councils.
But what was increasingly on his mind were the “war stories” he kept hearing about the growing numbers of hardened, remorseless juveniles that were showing up in the prison system. One life-inmate told him: “I was a bad-ass street gladiator, but these kids are stone-cold predators.” The phrase was translated as “super-predators” in Body Count, a book DiIulio published last year with William Bennett, the author and former drug czar, and John P. Walters, an expert on drugs and crime.
DiIulio now regrets using the term, which led some critics to suggest that the authors were encouraging readers to disavow kinship with the worst juvenile offenders. He believes in the possibility of rehabilitation, but he also is convinced, on the basis both of a cost-benefits analysis and, more important, his understanding of the social contract, that the most useful approach to violent crime is rooting out its causes. Having predicted that during the first 10 or 15 years of the 21st century, we will see successive waves of violent crime, committed by drug-dealing teenagers who fear neither arrest nor imprisonment, DiIulio feels an obligation to try to prevent this bleak scenario from coming to pass.
He believes that criminals are bred in morally impoverished environments. He defines “moral poverty” as “the poverty of being without loving, capable, responsible adults who teach you right from wrong.” He says that when he has “come up close and personal to a super-predator,” he has always found “a kid who has suffered unrelenting abuse and neglect.” These young and violent offenders have never known what made him and his street-corner buddies “feel rich — unconditional love, or something close to it,” from adults — who never hesitated to discipline them, he adds.
But his conviction is not just visceral. DiIulio cites a longitudinal study of 1,000 children and teens, almost all from low-income, single-parent families, who participated in Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America (BB/BS). It showed that youngsters matched with mentors, who met with them three times a month for four hours each time, were 46 percent less likely than a comparison group to initiate drug use, 27 percent less likely to start drinking, one third less likely to commit assault, and half as likely to be truant from school. “The evidence is compelling that the difference between at-risk youth who make it and those who don’t is often but a single nurturing, capable adult who is there for the child on at least a predictable part-time basis,” DiIulio notes.
AMERICA HAS some 65,000 black churches with 23 million adherents. So far, DiIulio’s observations suggest that they “are outperforming many secular alternatives in terms of primary and secondary crime prevention.” He would like to see them able to compete for government and private funding to support their social-service initiatives.
DiIulio believes he can help by synthesizing the findings of existing studies on the efficacy of faith-based interventions, constructing an inventory of programs conducted by some 50 African-American churches in 20 big cities, and coordinating the efforts of their leaders to find financial assistance above and beyond the good-will offerings of church members. He has created an organization called PRRAY (Partnership for Research on Religion and At-Risk Youth), which includes institutional and individual members, to aid him in achieving his objectives. He writes essays setting forth his ideas at a furious pace and speaks with fervor to organizations that might include potential supporters, including the Wharton School’s Board of Overseers.
DiIulio is working through two groups in particular — the
Council on Crime in America, of which he is a member, and Public/Private
Ventures (P/PV), an organization he directs that studies and develops
programs for young people — to highlight for foundations and government
granting agencies the initiatives of people like Pastor Benjamin Smith
in Philadelphia, the Rev. Eugene Rivers III in Boston, and Dr. William
Howard, Jr. in New York.
Now 83, Smith built the Deliverance Evangelistic Church complex
on the site of the bandbox once called Shibe Park and then Connie Mack
Stadium. His church specializes in providing literacy training, prison
fellowship, one-on-one drug counseling and rehabilitation, and much more
to thousands of youth where, in another era, the Philadelphia Athletics
and Phillies played baseball. Rivers, a former gang member who left
Harvard to establish a youth outreach ministry in one of Boston’s
roughest neighborhoods, developed and implemented a plan to mobilize
churches to combat youth violence and despair. Howard, the president of
New York Theological Seminary, provides theology training to people
whose communities are in crisis so they can empower and transform the
places where they work and live.
PRRAY and P/PV are helping these African-American ministers and
their counterparts in other cities build their capacity for good works
by learning to describe, analyze, and evaluate their outreach efforts so
as to establish their merit in the eyes of potential funders. In
addition, DiIulio is seeking support to construct a national,
site-specific databank about the range of faith-based initiatives that
attempt to influence, guide, and rescue troubled children. He has begun
research to identify the main administrative and other features of
successful crime prevention programs, especially strategies designed to
change the everyday lives of young people by strengthening their
connections with neighborhood adults. Passing the hat, he raised some
$40,000 in direct aid for inner-city youth ministries in his first
fund-seeking foray. P/PV also provided the technical assistance
necessary for a $750,000 foundation grant to support street-level
ministry work in Boston. Over the summer, the group formally laid plans
for a multi-million dollar PRRAY church-anchored youth and community
development plan involving direct assistance, technical assistance,
research and evaluation, education, and training in a dozen cities,
including Philadelphia.
“I’m prepared to try a full court press to change the prospects
for children who are most at risk,” DiIulio says. “If it means having no
university base of operations, I’m ready to pay that price.” But it
hasn’t come to that yet. As he was last year, DiIulio remains in an
extended half-time arrangement with Princeton. He is on leave this fall,
and in the spring will teach a freshman seminar on Saving At-Risk Urban
Youth, he says.
As DiIulio walks city streets with men and women of faith to
document their human salvage operations, he will tell them they need
“benchmarks to satisfy the funding community.” He will tell the funding
community “not to set their standards of proof so high that it will seem
as if nothing works.” For the foreseeable future, moreover, DiIulio
also will be seeking out people, on the metropolitan periphery and in
distant suburbs, who are willing to expand their definition of neighbor.
Mary Ann Meyers, former secretary of the University of Pennsylvania, is a writer and consultant.