BODY COUNT: Moral Poverty...And How to Win America's War Against Crime and Drugs - Hardcover

And there are a lot more violent teenagers on the way.

This is the calm before a storm so dangerous as to make all that has gone before a pale comparison. For as the number of teenagers increases by nearly one quarter in the years leading up to 2005-a population of teenagers with a higher incidence of serious drug use, more access to powerful firearms, and fewer moral restraints than any such group in American history-these "super-predators" may make us long for the quiet of the 1980s.

What has caused America to become the industrial world's most victimized society? How have we become history's most violent "civilized" nation? And perhaps most telling of all, how have we become so desensitized to the facts-10 million victimizations annually, and a fourfold increase in reported crimes since the early 1960s?

Body Count diagnoses America's plague of violent crime. Its authors-William Bennett, John Dilulio, and John Walters-define the epidemic's size, its range, and its scope. Through stories and anecdotes they present the very real human tragedies behind the numbers. Most important, they describe the source of violent crime: abject moral poverty, the destitution visited upon children raised without loving, capable, responsible adults who teach right from wrong. Though dozens of other explanations have been offered for America's horrifying rates of violent crime-from academics and clinicians, cops and social workers, politicians on the right and the left-they are, at best, proxies for the real cause. It is not prisons (or their scarcity), guns (or their excess), the death penalty, the exclusionary rule, or even material impoverishment. Look to the root of a criminally twisted tree, the authors argue, and you will find only moral poverty and its parasite: drug abuse.

And argue they do, with both powerful rhetoric and rigorous analysis. Bennett, Dilulio, and Walters demolish such myths as: