even by the low standards of academic squabbling, a recent attack on Princeton University professor John DiIulio stood out as unusually intemperate. 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. he is “dangerous,” declared one detractor. “Everything he does is crummy.” Academics rarely criticize one another so bluntly in public, and the article quickly aroused strong emotions in the smallk, hot-tempered world of criminology, in which DiIulion is a leading light.
It did not end there. In April, skirmishes over DiIulio broke out again, this time in the Nation and the ordinarily sedate pages of the Princeton Alumni Weekly. As they had done in Legal Times, DiIulio’s critics once more savaged him as a third-rate academic with suspect motives.
Strangely, the attacks for the most part lacked specific examples of DiIulio’s allegedly fraudulent scholarship. 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. Kenneth Schoen, head of criminal justice programs at the liberal Edna McConnell Clark Foundation and one of DiIulio’s most outspoken detractors, admits as mcuh. ” Generally his numbers are right,” Schoen concedes. “I wouldn’t say they were wrong.” 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 criminoligists.
It is, in some ways, an odd accusation, DiIulio does indeed have influence on Capitor HIll; his studies of prison inmates and sentencing policies have helped shape debate more than once on the House floor. All of which should, by traditional measures, raise the 37-year-old professor’s standing among his peers. Unlike many other academic disciplines, after all, criminology is designed to have an effect on the public sphere. The conclusions a criminologist reaches are meant to influence politicians.
And for more than a century they have. 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. 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 acuate 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. Countless criminologists have followed Ellis’s lead, acting as advisers to federal and state governments, from the 1968 Kernere Commission on urban riots to the present. By working to ensure that his views reach the ears of elected officials, in other words, DiIulio has hardly been plowing new ground.
Or perhaps he has, becuase on many questions of crime policy he is dramatically out of step with his colleagues. Most criminologists argue that American relies far too heavily on punitive measures, particularly prisions, to fight crime. A more enlightened country, they say, would work to remedy the social injustices that give rise to criminality in the first place. As Jerome Skolnick, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who was 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. You can’t really hope to have people working, although plenty of people do.” As a result, Skolnick and others say, people commit crimes.
DiIulio appears to have little patience for questions like these, or for their politically loaded answeres. Instead, he argues that whiel some rehabilitation programs may be effective, none serves the primary goal fo crime controal — protecting the public — as well as prisions. 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.”
Such statements seem almost designated to irritate his largely liberal colleagues, and DiIulio, a fantastically prolific writer, has made a lot of them. 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. (DiIulio has published five pieces in The Weekly Standard.) 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. Far from winning priase from his liberal counterparts, however, DiIulio’s productivity has been cited by many as an indication of his outsized ego. In an interview with Legal Times, Skolnick implied that this sizabel mass of scholarship has amounted to little more than a public relations campaign. DiIulio, Skolnick said, is less a criminologist than “the spokesperson for the Gingrich group.”
Skolnick’s charge is neither fair nor accurate. A lifelong Democrat who was the first in his family to graduate from high school, DiIulio regularly defends social welfare programs in print. Last March, for example, he completed one of the first and most detailed analyses of the Contract with America. His conclusion (published by the center-left Brookings Institution where he is a fellow) was hardly a product of the speaker’s press office. 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 ofdevolutionist faith” — is “totally and demonstrably false.” Perhaps on the basis of sentiments like thse, DiIulio recnelty received a $ 250,000 research grant from the leftish Ford Foundation. Indeed, apart from his views on incarceration, it is hard to see how DiIulio finds himself accused of being an agent of Newt Gingrich.
And yet he does. Several years ago, when DiIulio was first invited to joing 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. He said it was a disgrace, and how could I do that? I’d never had a phone call like that in my life. It was ideological war.”
Or perhaps it’s more simple than that. Summing up his disdain for DiIulio, Jerome Skolnick reaches for what is clearly meant to be the ultimate insult. ” John,” he sniffs, “just doesn’t act like an academic.”
by Tucker Carlson
