The Crime Doctor Is In : But Not Everyone Likes Prof. John DiIulio’s Message: There Is No Big Fix

Washington is not a town that readily warms to the “nothing-can-be-done” school of thought. So when John J. DiIulio, Princeton University’s resident crime expert and one of Washington’s in-vogue thinkers, recently sat down to lunch with a dozen media and think-tank heavies, his grim prognosis on violence in America was tough gristle for most of his audience to swallow.

As half-empty cans of Diet Coke fizzle out and piles of left-over sandwiches fossilize in the dry office air, the burly criminologist offered this upbeat fact: By century’s end, the nation’s streets will be plagued by at least 30,000 more murderers, muggers and rapists--all more brutal and uncaring than the current crop. “They will come,” he added in his matter-of-fact Philadelphia accent, “and there is nothing that can be done about that.”

Thanks, professor. Way to spoil lunch.

It’s not that Washingtonians shy away from hard facts. On the contrary, inside the Beltway it’s considered an enviable achievement to have--or, more likely, pretend to have--an inside track on reality outside the Beltway. But hard-core Washingtonians can’t resist nurturing the conceit that they have the power to shape that reality. Whatever their politics, the politicians and pundits and policy-makers who drift here generally share the idealistic-naive-egoistic (take your pick) belief that what they do matters.

Even someone as skeptical of Washington’s influence as DiIulio’s host this day--former drug czar William Bennett--can’t quite give up the addiction. Bennett’s own doubts about whether politics could address society’s “spiritual decline” helped seal his decision last year to forgo a run for the GOP presidential nomination. But so far “The Book of Virtues” author hasn’t been sighted heading off to Detroit to launch a career as juvenile counselor either.

Street crime is a problem that legally belongs to the states. But with the issue routinely topping the list of citizen worries in opinion polls, it’s become a cause celebre for Washington’s liberals and conservatives alike. What if we spend $40 million on midnight basketball leagues to get urban youths off the streets? What if we frighten violent criminals with visions of no-parole decades behind bars? What if we cut off welfare checks to unwed mothers so they are forced to marry before having children? What if we just send a blank check to the states and let them decide how to put families and neighborhoods back together?

DiIulio walks into that clashing chorus with his own fortissimo: Crime, he asserts, is not a national problem with a national solution. Like his former teacher, UCLA’s James Q. Wilson--another popular intellectual in Washington--DiIulio comes from the school of research that says crime is largely driven by demographics. More male teen-agers, more crime. Period. By century’s end, a baby boomlet will add another half a million boys to the 14- to 17-year-old range. Six percent of those boys can reliably be expected to commit at least half the violent crimes.

The 36-year-old DiIulio arrived at the lunchtime session armed with all the right Washington credentials: influential Op-Ed pieces in outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, a top post at the capital’s venerable Brookings Institution, years of intensive field research under his belt.

But outside this tiny conference room at Bennett’s D.C.-based think tank, Empower America, DiIulio could easily be mistaken for one of the cops or prosecutors he grew up with on Philadelphia’s working-class southside. He is the kind of guy who--no kidding--makes it a point to visit the local prison on his vacation stops.

None of that experience, however, makes his “nothing works” message any more palatable to this crowd, drawn from the ranks of Washington journalists and pundits who get paid to think Big Thoughts: Newsweek’s Joe Klein, Roll Call Editor Morton Kondracke, the New Republic’s Fred Barnes, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, Gerald Seib of the Wall Street Journal, syndicated columnists Mona Charen and Suzanne Fields, and Policy Review Editor Adam Meyerson, among others.

In trying to find a way for Washington to turn around DiIulio’s grim scenario, the journalists stuck to familiar terrain: What does he think of the Democratic and Republican crime bills? (Not much.) What does he think of welfare reform? (Even less.) And so it fell to Bennett, visibly restless over his guest’s talk, to pose the bottom-line question, the one that was uppermost on everybody’s minds:

“What should we do?” he pleaded of his guest. “Name some things.”

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DiIulio and a Harvard University colleague, Anne Morrison Piehl, argue that prison pays. Even at an annual cost of as much as $25,000 per inmate, DiIulio and Piehl contend, keeping violent repeat criminals in jail is a bargain when compared with the law enforcement and social costs of allowing them back on the street.

With prisoners in most states spending less than 40% of their sentenced time behind bars, DiIulio favors stiff, predictable jail terms as a way to protect people from crime. That would mean expanding the prison population from 1 million to as much as 1.5 million.

And if the Feds want to help out the states with money for prison construction, fine. But DiIulio disputes the conservative argument that get-tough sentencing will make offenders think twice. “The new breed of predatory street criminal cannot be deterred,” he says. “They can only be incapacitated.”

Even though he’s a favorite among conservatives, DiIulio is a lifelong Democrat and a product of Catholic schools who says he doesn’t underestimate the difficulty of children in poor, violence-plagued families overcoming the deck of cards they were dealt at birth. The problem is that DiIulio just doesn’t see a politically acceptable way to put troubled families and neighborhoods back together.

DiIulio describes a breed of “super-predator” criminal so dangerous that even the older inmates working their way through life sentences complain that their youthful counterparts are out of control.

He describes these teen criminals as “radically present-oriented”: Because their time horizon may be as short as the next guard’s shift, they have no capacity to defer gratification for the sake of the future. When asked by DiIulio or other inmates if they would commit their crimes again, most answer, “Why not?”

And, he says, they are “radically self-regarding”--”incapable of feeling joy or pain at the joy or pain of others.

“We are producing a large number of people that have no adults in their lives” capable of providing a moral compass, he says. He grabs a white napkin and holds it up to show what the visitor log looks like at most juvenile detention centers: no visitors.

While the end-of-the-century crime wave DiIulio forecasts will be mostly confined to the inner city, he says that its toll will horrify nervous suburbanites. “Kids will be going to elementary school with guns. I expect to see gun violence among very young children,” he says.

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At the luncheon, DiIulio wouldn’t budge when Roll Call’s Kondracke noted that the crime rate has slowed over the past two years, as--incidentally--Congress has turned its attention to the issue. Demographics, DiIulio responded. The lull before the storm.

Later, DiIulio added that the drop-off in crime may be partly the result of what he calls “target-hardening”: Those who can afford it are buying alarm systems and hooking clubs onto their cars’ steering wheels.

Like others around the table, Newsweek’s Klein had trouble buying DiIulio’s argument that there is no way to deter these young offenders. Don’t they understand parole? he asked.

“That would require them to figure out the relationship between what is happening now and the future,” DiIulio responded, adding that instances of youths laughing and joking on the way to the police station after being arrested for some heinous crime “is not being macho (for these kids). It’s just being.”

Finally, Bennett and Peter Wehner, Empower America’s policy director, pressed DiIulio to prescribe a course of action--a DiIulio Crime Bill. Like a guest of honor who suddenly realized he has insulted his hosts, DiIulio tried to rise to the occasion.

At one point, he suggested quick action to remove young children from criminal environments. At another, he repeated his support for more jails and tougher sentences, and for community-based policing that would force more officers to live in and walk the streets of troubled neighborhoods. He even provided a sound bite-sized recommendation for federal spending on troubled youth: “Early, expensive and intensive works.” But just as quickly, DiIulio popped his own balloon. Even with these kinds of measures, he said, “It’s a war of inches at the margins.”

“You’ve painted a bleak picture,” injected Wehner, the architect of this noontime session. “Is there anything that gives people hope out there?”

DiIulio reached into his stash of upbeat anecdotes and told the story of his grandmother, who survived the Depression and lit candles in church for two sons lost in World War II. “Things are a hell of a lot better than when she started lighting those candles,” he said. “Even among the poorest of the poor, we’ve succeeded in increasing per capita income.”

The session could have ended there, on this slightly disingenuous--if more optimistic--note. But Wehner, reading the minds of his guests, wouldn’t let it pass. He pressed DiIulio on the demonstrable rise of social pathologies over the past two decades: crime, violence, drugs, family breakdown.

The country’s future, DiIulio began, “depends on whether people (in all socioeconomic) classes behave in ways that decrease social capital or increase social capital.”

His grandmother stayed in her Philadelphia neighborhood as it declined into another blighted city block, walking past the graffiti and broken windows, even surviving three violent muggings. The Italian grandmother was angered that her sons and grandchildren had abandoned their roots for safer zones. To this first-generation immigrant, being American meant helping thy neighbor.

“She was the last piece of social capital in that neighborhood,” DiIulio said. “I have no idea what combination of social policies can turn those things around. If I had to bet, I would bet against us.”

After the lunch, DiIulio said this wasn’t the first Washington audience to be disappointed by his message. “I tend not to get invited back to a lot of places.”