Letting Him have It
Carlson, Tucker
Letting Him Have It by Tucker Carlson Even by the low standards of academic squabbling, a recent attack on Princeton University professor John DiIulio stood out as unusually intemperate. In a...
...I wouldn't say they were wrong...
...According to DiIulio, the core assumption upon which the entire Republican Contract was built-an idea DiIulio described as the "blame-the-federal-bureaucracy article of devolutionist faith"-is "totally and demonstrably false...
...Skolnick's charge is neither fair nor accurate...
...And all this in addition to producing piles of scholarly research reports, giving dozens of speeches, and teaching a full load of classes at Princeton...
...He and DiIulio's other critics level a more slippery charge: The tenured Princeton professor is not really a scholar at all, but a right-wing ideologue, a puppet of the Republican Congress whose conclusions about crime cannot be taken seriously by legitimate criminologists...
...As he wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece earlier this year, when it comes to preventing "known convicted criminals from murdering, raping, robbing, assaulting and stealing, then incarceration is a solution, and a highly cost-effective one...
...Indeed, apart from his views on incarceration, it is hard to see how DiIulio finds himself accused of being an agent of Newt Gingrich...
...As they had done in Legal Times, DiIulio's critics once more savaged him as a third-rate academic with suspect motives...
...It is, in some ways, an odd accusation...
...John," he sniffs, "just doesn't act like an academic...
...And for more than a century they have...
...Last March, for example, he completed one of the first and most detailed analyses of the Contract with America...
...With a single exception (which DiIulio later described as an honest mistake and apologized for), DiIulio's critics did not accuse him of actually using incorrect data...
...By working to ensure that his views reach the ears of elected officials, in other words, DiIulio has hardly been plowing new ground...
...In April, skirmishes over DiIulio broke out again, this time in the Nation and the ordinarily sedate pages of the Princeton Alumni Weekly...
...The conclusions a criminologist reaches are meant to influence politicians...
...Kenneth Schoen, head of criminal justice programs at the liberal Edna McConnell Clark Foundation and one of DiIulio's most outspoken detractors, admits as much...
...Between February 1994 and September 1995, for example, DiIulio wrote or edited five books, wrote 18 magazine articles and reviews, and published numerous newspaper opeds on crime, including eight in the Wall Street Journal alone...
...Or perhaps it's more simple than that...
...His conclusion (published by the center-left Brookings Institution, where he is a fellow) was hardly a product of the speaker's press office...
...You can't really hope to have people working, although plenty of people do...
...Everything he does is crummy...
...In a story published in the February 12 Legal Times, a number of his fellow criminologists described DiIulio as a sloppy, dishonest scholar with unusually low professional standards...
...As Jerome Skolnick, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who has written widely on the subject, puts it: "If you want to deal with the crime problem, you have to ask questions like, 'What are the conditions under which crime prevails, crime erupts?'" As an example of those conditions, Skolnick points out that the country is ruled by "a Republican Congress that won't even raise the minimum wage to five bucks an hour...
...Perhaps on the basis of sentiments like these, DiIulio recently received a $250,000 research grant from the leftish Ford Foundation...
...DiIulio appears to have little patience for questions like these, or for their politically loaded answers...
...Or perhaps he has, because on many questions of crime policy he is dramatically out of step with his colleagues...
...As a result, Skolnick and others say, people commit crimes...
...In an interview with Legal Times, Skolnick implied that this sizable mass of scholarship has amounted to little more than a public relations campaign...
...A more enlightened country, they say, would work to remedy the social injustices that give rise to criminality in the first place...
...Academics rarely criticize one another so bluntly in public, and the article quickly aroused strong emotions in the small, hot-tempered world of criminology, in which DiIulio is a leading light...
...Ellis's 1890 book The Criminal, while ostensibly a scientific survey of "criminal anthropology" (Ellis claimed that criminals had, among other qualities, bigger ears, longer arms, and a more acute sensitivity to weather conditions than the general population), was also a not-so-subtle pitch for prison reform and the abolition of the death penalty...
...I'd never had a phone call like that in my life...
...All of which should, by traditional measures, raise the 37-year-old professor's standing among his peers...
...Instead, he argues that while some rehabilitation programs may be effective, none serves the primary goal of crime control-protecting the public-as well as prisons...
...He is "dangerous," declared one detractor...
...DiIulio, Skolnick said, is less a criminologist than "the spokesperson for the Gingrich group...
...Several years ago, when DiIulio was first invited to join the Brookings Institution, Tom Mann, head of the think tank's government department, received a memorable complaint: "I got a call from one of the criminology types and he just started attacking me for having this ideologue, this right-winger associated with the Brookings Institution...
...Summing up his disdain for DiIulio, Jerome Skolnick reaches for what is clearly meant to be the ultimate insult...
...Far from winning praise from his liberal counterparts, however, DiIulio's productivity has been cited by many as an indication of his outsized ego...
...his studies of prison inmates and sentencing policies have helped shape debate more than once on the House floor...
...He said it was a disgrace, and how could I do that...
...DiIulio has published five pieces in THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...It was ideological war...
...The British physician Havelock Ellis, one of the first researchers to introduce the budding field of criminology to a wide audience, clearly wrote with the intent of shaping public policy...
...Unlike many other academic disciplines, after all, criminology is designed to have an effect on the public sphere...
...Strangely, the attacks for the most part lacked specific examples of DiIulio's allegedly fraudulent scholarship...
...DiIulio does indeed have influence on Capitol Hill...
...Such statements seem almost designed to irritate his largely liberal colleagues, and DiIulio, a fantastically prolific writer, has made a lot of them...
...And yet he does...
...Most criminologists argue that America relies far too heavily on punitive measures, particularly prisons, to fight crime...
...It did not end there...
...Generally his numbers are right," Schoen concedes...
...A lifelong Democrat who was the first in his family to graduate from high school, DiIulio regularly defends social welfare programs in print...
...Countless criminologists have followed Ellis's lead, acting as advisers to federal and state governments, from the 1968 Kerner Commission on urban riots to the present...
Vol. 1 • May 1996 • No. 36
