Body count : moral poverty-- and how to win America's war against crime and drugs /

Lately, Bennett's name on a book has meant surefire best-seller, whether the tome is an anthology of moral writings or the statistical compendium The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators. With its charts of data, Body Count is kin to the latter but adds prescriptions to its quantified vision of a society that seems not to care about increasing violent crime and drug abuse by ever younger criminals. Among those prescriptions are full law enforcement against lesser offenses (by cracking down on the little stuff, communities as diverse as Charleston, South Carolina, and New York City have seen major crime rates drop significantly); more scrupulous sentencing, paroling, and probationing; and revival of the moribund war against drugs. At the root of the problems they document, Bennett and company see "moral poverty" --"being without loving, capable, responsible adults who teach right from wrong." Personal commitment, Bennett and colleagues say, "may well be the cost of citizenship" in order to provide "the nurture, protection, and moral education of the rapidly increasing number of unattended and neglected young in our midst." Finally, religion--"the best and most reliable means we have to reinforce the good" --ought to be revived as "an aid and friend of the constitutional order." A cogent marshaling of worrisome evidence linked to proposals that seem mere wishful thinking. --Ray Olson

The authors bring vast amounts of varied expertise to the problems of crime and drugs in America. Bennett (The Moral Compass) was head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in the Bush administration; DiIulio is a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton; Walters directs the Council on Crime in America. Jointly, they offer a depressing analysis of the growing crime problem in the U.S., treating subjects like gun control (they are for it), incarceration and the death penalty (they believe both are applied capriciously), alcohol abuse (they feel it is underestimated as a cause of crime) and drug abuse (they are alarmed it is on the rise after declining steadily between 1980 and 1992). Most shocking to them is the neglect of children: many parents do not want them or do not want to raise them; many schools do not educate them; many government agencies are too inundated to assist them. All this is giving rise to what the authors call "superpredators," kids from 13 to 16 who apparently feel nothing as they kill, rob or rape. Refraining from any rigorous systemic or economic analyses, they ascribe this sad state of affairs to moral poverty and think that religion offers the best solution. Like Elikann, above, the authors argue their case intelligently, and with conviction. BOMC alternate. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The authors have impressive credentials. Bennett was director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President Bush. John DiIulio is a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University and a prolific writer on government and criminal justice topics. John Walters is the executive director of the Council on Crime in America. Here they "attempt to explain America's violent crime plague... to define its size, scope, and distribution, to show what the response of government has been; to explode the myths that dominate the crime and drug debate; to present profiles of what works; and to mark out new policy directions on how we can best contain it." Their book is both a compilation of facts and statistics and an opinion piece. The authors' solution to crime in our society is to eliminate "moral poverty," primarily by reducing drug abuse and meting out harsher and surer punishment for repeat and violent offenders. They would also strengthen community policing and victim's rights laws. This is a politically charged book, replete with inflammatory examples of crime. Most academic and public libraries will want to include it in their collections to present the more conservative side of the public debate on criminal justice policy issues.‘Mary Jane Brustman, SUNY at Albany Libs. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Virtuecrats Bennett and gang haul in the usual suspects in this flat-footed, statistic-heavy collection of warmed-over nostrums. If the doomsayers are right, we are soon in for the mother of all crime waves, as the Baby Boomers' offspring enter their dangerous late teens. Conjoined with the general decline in moral values, community, and sobriety, these teenagers will be horrifingly violent, cold-blooded ``super predators'' bent on mayhem for mayhem's sake. But don't despair: Bennett (The Moral Compass, 1995, etc.), Princeton professor DiIulio, and Walters, the executive director of the Council on Crime in America, have the answers: Restrict alcohol, ratchet up the war on drugs, increase prison sentences, make adoption easier, provide youth with positive role models, improve education, and above all, revive religious faith. To back up their tough-minded prescriptions, they've dredged up all the right corroborating statistics. While their findings are generally convincing--if not downright obvious--the authors could use a refresher course on the abuse and misuse of statistics; for instance, having cited various studies on the correlation of alcohol use and crime, they appropriately warn readers that there is no proof of a causal relationship; but they then do a backflip, citing mere ``common sense'' to support such a relationship. However, they do succeed in exploding several of the more popular canards about crime, including the frequently made assertion that our prisons are filled with nonviolent drug offenders and that poverty is the root cause of criminality. Despite the authors' desire to appear contrarian, most of the recommendations in this book (except the call for a renewed war on drugs) are squarely in the mainstream of modern criminological thought. But then, the virtue industry has never made a virtue of originality. (Book-of-the-Month Club selection; national television/radio satellite tours)