A clear and compelling diagnosis and prescription for the most alarming social problem in American history: the all-but-inevitable explosion in violent crime in the best ten years. Charts & tables.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
If it is difficult to take seriously a book on crime-fighting that starts by calling the Reagan-Bush drug war "the most successful attack on a serious social problem in the last quarter-century," consider that the authors up the ante with their alarmist forecasts of an approaching wave of youthful "super-predators," members of "the youngest, biggest and baddest generation any society has ever known." Evidence for this army of thugs seems slight in the face of sharp nationwide declines in rates of violent crime, but then former drug czar and self-appointed virtue expert William Bennett is preaching to the choir here anyway.
From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Bennett's warped interpretation,
By Gabe (Philadelphia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: BODY COUNT: Moral Poverty...And How to Win America's War Against Crime and Drugs (Hardcover)
I couldn't agree more with the last two reader reviews, and would like to add a bit more. This work has two fatal flaws that undermine all of his analysis. It consistenly confuses correlation and causality, and deliberatly ignores portions of counter-arguments inconvenient to Bennett's conclusion. Even using government funded studies, developed no doubt by Bennett's ideological kin, his defense of marijuana prohibition relies on an abusurd logical extension. First he shows that cocaine is a cause of violence. This is already a tenuous position in and of itself since he does nothing to disprove that cocaine prohibition is not responsible for more violence than the drug's pharmacological properties. The he relies on the long-defunct gateway theory to show that a lax approach to marijuana will generate thousands more violent cocaine addicts. Thus, marijuana must be thoroughly repressed. Yeah, obviously... no other way around that one. He states with indignation that more 15-18 year olds see marijuana as relatively harmless than any time in the preceeding decade and a half. Well, unfortunately even a moral fiat from the good Dr. Bennett cannot change the fact that the perception of pot as relatively harmless is, for the most part, accurate; no matter how uncomfortable it may make him. What about the claims that supply side drug interdiction is fatally flawed as a long term strategy? No worries, according to Body Count, since it worked in the very short run in 1992, it must be effective. The 60% drop in casual drug use between 1980 and 1992 a smashing success, akin to saving 60% of the rainforest or preventing 60% of unwanted pregnancies? You bet, of course Bennett fails to mention that the same period saw an unprecedented rise in drug market violence, an INCREASING number of 'hard core' drug abusers, destruction of civil liberties, a mushrooming prison population, the shredding of urban America's remaining social fabric, the demonization of blacks and junkies as drug war enemies, skyrocketing quantities of preventable and drug related AIDS cases, a burgeoning culture of intolerance, and the list goes on. To top it all off, in this book Bennett has the gall to criticize the media for not depicting the drug war as a success, when he, himself was frequently the one on national tv using fear-mongering rhetoric to drive the perception of a failing drug war.
12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Dr. Bennett et al are in over their heads.,
By A Customer
This review is from: BODY COUNT: Moral Poverty...And How to Win America's War Against Crime and Drugs (Hardcover)
This is perhaps the most incoherent book I have ever read regarding drug policy. "Except for some advocates of drug legalization, no on seriously doubts that drug abuse kills and injures millions of Americans and their children each year." - William J. Bennett co-author of "Body Count," page 19. The authors insist in Body Count that "[R]igorous and empirical data are the foundation for our analysis and the discussion that follows. As you will see, this book is chock-full of the latest and most reliable facts, figures, charts, and graphs about violent crime and drugs. To you the reader we say: bear with us. These numbers are crucial-crucial because we believe that any fruitful discussion about crime and punishment in America should proceed from a proper regard for facts." No disagreement with respect to that last sentence. Body Count, however, repeatedly offers up one correlation mistake after another. Bennett et al begin with a lengthy and lurid recounting of unspeakable, headline-grabbing recent violent crimes: from drive-by shootings to thrill-killings to horrific tales of child abuse. This is followed by a segment entitled Liquor, Disorder, and Crime, then a chapter on Restraining and Punishing Street Criminals. Only after 136 numbing pages of poignant crime victim vignettes and "hard" yet irrelevant data, do the authors get to their fundamental assertion (Chapter 4, Drugs, Crime, and Character): that illicit drug use is caused by and causes what they call "moral poverty," and by direct implication, that drug use causes the bulk of our crime problem. "If one wants to know the immediate causes of much of America's moral poverty, the destruction of large parts of our inner cities, and its record-high crime rates, it is impossible to overlook drug use" (pg. 137). For these authors, illicit drugs are more or less circularly bad because they are illicit, illicit because they are bad. More to the point, drugs are bad because they are "pleasurable" (pg. 141) and that "drug use fosters moral poverty and remorseless criminality; that drug use destroys character and brutalizes the lives of users and those around them" (pg. 139). Total abstinence is the only solution for Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters. Never mind that the vast majority of illicit drug users commit no crimes other than their acquisition and use of drugs. Never mind that the National Academy of Sciences recently concluded (see Under the Influence? Drugs and the American Workforce) that "[M]ost alcohol and other drug users do not develop patterns of clinically defined abuse or dependence." This lamentable book is shot through with the usual weasel words and phrases such as "fosters," "associated with," "linked to," "correlated with," and so forth ad nauseum. The "hard data" come from the usual lineup of suspect partisan sources. The authors' conclusions? More enforcement; harsh punishment for even occasional recreational drug use; drug testing; zero tolerance; dismissal out-of-hand of all talk of "root causes" (other than their own take on the topic); more Loving-Two-Parent-Norman-Rockwell-Families teaching Just-Don't-Do-It; more God in our lives. More empirical and policy baloney of the sort this book typifies.
8 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Another rant from the Republican Party's Travis Bickle,
By A Customer
This review is from: BODY COUNT: Moral Poverty...And How to Win America's War Against Crime and Drugs (Hardcover)
William Bennett must have loved that famous Scorsese film "Taxi Driver."Here we see William Bennett muttering, perhaps a wee bit more eloquent than Scorsese's protagonist, at the "dirt" and "scum" and "filth" of "criminals," all the while ignoring their own trails of blood and sorrow. Bennett's policies have helped created an economic climate where one can make a fortune selling crack and crystal meth. 'Nuff said about Bennett's "morality."
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